Summary of David Quammen's The Tangled Tree

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Charles Darwin kept a secret notebook that he used to record his wildest ideas. He believed that the forms of living creatures weren’t eternally stable, but had changed over time.

#2 Darwin had begun thinking about evolution, and had begun writing down his ideas in a notebook. He had read Zoonomia, a medical treatise written by his grandfather, which contained some provocative musings about how all warm-blooded animals had evolved from one living filament.

#3 Darwin was a young man when he began writing about his ideas on evolution. He noticed patterns in the world around him, and he wondered if there was a law of adaptation at work.

#4 The tree of life was a venerable idea in 1837, and Darwin could adapt it to his purposes as an evolutionary theorist. He drew a sketch of a three-branched coral of life, with the inanimate lower sections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350015829

IRB Media

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Insights on David Quammen's The Tangled Tree

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Charles Darwin kept a secret notebook that he used to record his wildest ideas. He believed that the forms of living creatures weren’t eternally stable, but had changed over time.

#2

Darwin had begun thinking about evolution, and had begun writing down his ideas in a notebook. He had read Zoonomia, a medical treatise written by his grandfather, which contained some provocative musings about how all warm-blooded animals had evolved from one living filament.

#3

Darwin was a young man when he began writing about his ideas on evolution. He noticed patterns in the world around him, and he wondered if there was a law of adaptation at work.

#4

The tree of life was a venerable idea in 1837, and Darwin could adapt it to his purposes as an evolutionary theorist. He drew a sketch of a three-branched coral of life, with the inanimate lower sections.

#5

The tree of life is an ancient poetic image that has been used in Western thought for centuries. It was first used by Aristotle in his History of Animals, and was later modified by the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet in 1745.

#6

The linear approach to depicting life’s diversity was being replaced by its more complex and dimensional successor, the tree. By the late eighteenth century, natural philosophers tried to classify and arrange living creatures into distinct groups and subgroups, reflecting their similarities and differences.

#7

The tree of life was an old symbol by the 1800s, and it was also used to organize biology. It was not meant to imply that all plants had descended from common ancestors by some sort of material process of transformation.

#8

Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, published in 1735, was a unique and peculiar thing: a big folio volume of barely more than a dozen pages, like a coffee-table atlas, in which he outlined a classification system for all the members of what he considered the three kingdoms of nature: plants, animals, and minerals.

#9

Linnaeus’s system of plant classification was more innovative, comprehensive, and orderly than Augier’s. It was based on the number, size, and arrangement of stamens, and he named twenty-three classes, into which he placed all the flowering plants.

#10

The tree of life was changing, and it was reflecting a challenge to faith. It met strong resistance. The idea was coming soon, and it would change the way we view evolution.

#11

Lamarck’s tree of dots, which depicted animal diversity, was a branched diagram that descended down the page. The secret shape was a tree. In his book Philosophie Zoologique, he included a separate ladder for animals, which showed an ascending series of forms.

#12

Edward Hitchcock was a counterpoint to Lamarck, as he offered a last pre-evolutionary tree in the decades before Darwin changed everything. He was a devout, driven New England Yankee, and his Paleontological Chart reflected his view of humans as the apogee of creation.

#13

Hitchcock was a hypochondriac who was constantly feeling death near him, but he lived to be seventy. He was a pastor for the rest of his life, and