A Compaignye of Sondry Folk: Mereology, Medieval Poetics and Contemporary Evolutionary Narrative in Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale

Abstract

An exploration is presented of the use of Chaucerian poetics, specifically literary form, allegory and medieval compilation theory, to present evolution as a poetic structure in Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, which is a popular scientific explanation of evolution modelled on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Dawkins addresses common misunderstandings of evolutionary theory, in particular regarding anthropocentric visions of human exceptionalism. Chaucer’s poetics provide an ethical framework for understanding the complex relations between parts and wholes (mereology) that underpin Dawkins’ ethical arguments about the place of humanity in evolution. Understanding how these two texts work together allows us to imagine new possibilities for relations in literature and science going forward into the 21st century, encouraging holistic grounds for knowledge that nevertheless retain the authority of disciplinary expertise.

Keywords:

• Richard Dawkins
• Ancestor’s Tale
• Chaucer
• Canterbury Tales
• evolution

Notes

1 An ongoing research project, ‘What Scientists Read’, asks the question ‘how does literature influence scientific thought and practice?’ See the project website at: http://www.whatscientists read.com (03/06/13).

2 For discussions on mereology and literature see Jernigan (2007, 1–12) and Sleigh and Rogers (2012, 294–8).

3 For an overview of evolution in literary applications see Amigoni 2011. Major studies include Beer 1983, Levine 1991, Holmes 2009; on the impact of evolutionary theory in literary criticism and textual editing see Moretti 2005, Carroll 2004, Baker 2008, Robins 2007. For an overview of a related subject — genetics, literature, and culture — see Roof 2011, as well as Kay 2000 and Keller 2002 and 1995.

4 Darwin’s original phrase is part of an unfortunately racist consideration of his own connection to ‘savages’; Dawkins’s imaginative connection to gibbons is in no way racist.

5 Dawkins’ counter-example is the breastbone and wing construction of pigeons: ‘Do we count the breastbone and flapping wings as two separate features…[or] do we count them as only a single feature, on the grounds that the state of one character determines the other, or at least reduces its freedom to vary? …. Reasonable people can be found arguing on opposite sides’ (131–2).

6 Dawkins uses a version of this pun in the first sentence of The Ancestor’s Tale; the original phrase is attributed variously to Elbert Hubbard and Edna St Vincent Millay.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janine Rogers

Janine Rogers is Associate Professor of Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English Literatures at Mount Allison University in Canada. She is the author of two forthcoming books, Eagle (Reaktion Press, 2014) and Unified Fields: Science and Literary Form (McGill-Queen”s University Press, 2014). She has published articles on literature and science in The Review of English Studies, Mosaic, The Journal of Literature and Science, and English Studies in Canada. She is currently researching the heritage of medieval literate culture in science as seen in popular science writing and science museums.