The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
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About this ebook
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and A New York Times Notable Book of 2018.
Our understanding of the ‘tree of life’, with powerful implications for human genetics, human health and our own human nature, has recently completely changed.
This book is about a new method of telling the story of life on earth – through molecular phylogenetics. It involves a fairly simple method – the reading of the deep history of life by looking at the variation in protein molecules found in living organisms. For instance, we now know that roughly eight per cent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection.
In The Tangled Tree, acclaimed science writer David Quammen chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made them – such as Carl Woese, the most important little-known biologist of the twentieth century; Lynn Margulis, the notorious maverick whose wild ideas about ‘mosaic’ creatures proved to be true; and Tsutomu Wantanabe, who discovered that the scourge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a direct result of horizontal gene transfer, bringing the deep study of genome histories to bear on a global crisis in public health.
Quammen explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life – including where we humans fit into it. Thanks to new technologies, we now have the ability to alter even our genetic composition – through sideways insertions, as nature has long been doing. The Tangled Tree is a brilliant exploration of our transformed understanding of evolution and of life’s history itself.
David Quammen
David Quammen’s books include Breathless, The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside, among other magazines, and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion, and with three Russian wolfhounds, a cross-eyed cat, and a rescue python. Visit him at DavidQuammen.com.
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Reviews for The Tangled Tree
95 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The author says that this is a history of molecular phylogenetics. It is and I also think of it as a personal biographical and gossipy approach to the history of the development of the idea of the phylogenetic tree. Principal topics are the discovery of the archaea, the discovery of endosymbiosis in eukaryotes by chloroplasts and mitochondria, the discovery of lateral gene transfer - first in bacteria and then everywhere, and, in a flurry at the end, the microbiome, transposons, endogenous retroviruses, and CRISPR. The book is organized historically, and largely around the life and relationships of Carl Woese. Until I finished it I thought this book to be a standard 4 star work, but, as it ended, it made me think of many other things not directly discussed, including my own career, and I’ve gone full five stars on it.
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The author uses kibitz in a non-standard way to seemingly mean that he had monitored a class. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The real guts of this work is an accounting of the life and times of Carl Woese, a pioneer in the molecular analysis of life, and what it says about evolution, who had the misfortune to live long enough to see his insights transcended by new research and wasn't especially happy about it. If there is a tragedy about the man (people would kill for his life in its totality) it's that he didn't have much of the makings of a political animal or of a happy warrior, as compared to, say, Lynn Margulis, who was much more of a household name back in the day and had much more the emotional constitution to let the chips fall where they may.From the science perspective the most important part of this book for the lay reader (and this is popular history, not a textbook) is the discovery and implications of horizontal gene transfer or, more to the point, evolution via infection. The biggest implication being the realization that what look like discrete organisms making up species are at a basic level mobile ecologies; and there are still discoveries to be made that will probably render much of the science considered in this book obsolete.As for the more negative reviews of this book I don't know what these readers were expecting; this is not a textbook and the usual reader of popular science expects to learn something about the people conducting the science. I also highly doubt that most readers are aware of the state of the science that Quammen is reporting on. I will agree that Quammen is a little too cute for his own good sometimes in his writing style.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We know about books with antiheroes. Is it possible to have a book with an anti-plot?This is a book containing a tremendous amount of biological information, mostly about the history of life, and it can teach you a lot of things that you didn't learn in high school biology -- in particular, about horizontal gene transfer and about the Archaea, one of the great domains of life whose existence was not suspected until quite recently. Yet this is all mixed up with the life of Carl Woese, the great scientist who recognized the Archaea but who otherwise was rather far removed from the mainstream -- and from all the other research covered in this book.All of that results in a book that doesn't really lead anywhere. For example, a big part of the theme of this book is that the "Tree of Life" -- the great branching organization that starts with some ancient life form and eventually splits into us and into giraffes and and tree frogs and amoebae and Clostridioides difficile bacteria -- isn't really a tree, because of horizontal gene transfer. If one bacterium can snitch a gene from another bacterium, or if we can "catch" a gene from a retrovirus, then our genetic lineage isn't really independent of that other lineage, right?Granting that I am not a theoretical biologist, I don't think this follows. The essence of Neo-Darwinism is that evolution proceeds through natural (or sexual) selection based on genetic mutation -- new genes appearing in the genome.And what, pray tell, is horizontal gene transfer except new genes appearing in the genome? From the standpoint of your cells, it doesn't matter if the new gene came in via transfer or via a radiation-caused mutation. It's just a new gene, and will be selected for or against just like any other new gene. Does this change the tree of life? Not really. If you transfer one or two new genes into me, I'll be a human with one or two new genes, not a chimpanzee or a sea slug. If I were to breed, I would have to breed with other humans or not at all. Does the tree of life have a lot of odd connections between branches? Sure, especially among the bacteria and archaea. But the general picture is still one of diffusion.So what, exactly, does this book prove? I'm not sure. I'm glad I read it; there really is a tremendous amount of information here. But it doesn't lead to anything. What does horizontal gene transfer imply, apart from the fact that the tree of life is more complicated than we thought? Uh.... What does Carl Woese's life tell us, other than that being cranky all the time doesn't help your chances of having your greatness recognized? Uh.... In other words, what does all this stuff mean? Of course, science probably doesn't have the answers yet. But this book doesn't even give us a clue what questions we should be asking. The real lesson of modern biology is that evolution has no direction and no purpose -- it isn't "intended" to produce humans (or nematodes, or E. coli); it just works to suit whatever creatures are around to their environment. In its lack of a clear purpose, this book may teach us more about evolution than its author intended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quammen's book about the unraveling of some of evolution's workings is fascinating, both for the human characters and their interrelationships and for the molecular revelations of horizontal gene transfer and other discoveries. A couple of things I didn't like: his habit of dangling some long technical term in front of the reader and either saying "never mind" or "we'll say more about that later"; cutesy cues that something big is coming later in the book--okay, but either tell me what it is or just get the tell over with. I read this as a serious book and these little tricks did not endear Quammen to me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Aristotle taught us that species were inviolate. Darwin taught that species were volatile in time. Woese taught us that there is no species.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5All waffle and no content. When I bought this I hoped for some up to date information on evolution. What I got was; a paragraph on wether somebody's mother had read an article or not and being told which computer was used to write an article.The scientific content would fit on two pages. I've thrown it away.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Loved. LOVED! this book. I've always been a sucker for scientists who can convey serious content in a way that is accessible to the non-scientist. Quammen is one of the best at that. Fascinating.