The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen (PDF)

Description

In this New York Times bestseller and longlist nominee for the National Book Award, “our greatest living chronicler of the natural world” (The New York Times), David Quammen explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology affect our understanding of evolution and life’s history. In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new field—the study of life’s diversity and relatedness at the molecular level—is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. It turns out that HGT has been widespread and important; we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived sideways by viral infection—a type of HGT. In The Tangled Tree, “the grandest tale in biology….David Quammen presents the science—and the scientists involved—with patience, candor, and flair” (Nature). We learn about the major players, 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. “David Quammen proves to be an immensely well-informed guide to a complex story” (The Wall Street Journal). In The Tangled Tree, he explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life—including where we humans fit upon 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 source of wonder….Quammen has written a deep and daring intellectual adventure” (The Boston Globe).

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐”The Tangled Tree” is a book about how our understanding of evolution has been changing during the years since Darwin publication of the “On the Origin of the Species.” Thus, I guess this book should be read as an epic voyage through time (nothing less) by which you can discover the different frameworks that scientist built for putting inside the very meaning of evolution.Yes, all began with a tree. You can see that in a figure drawn by Darwin himself in one of his notebooks (1837). The drawing is accompanied by a note that says, “I think” (p. 8).But as time went by, that tree began to suffer some transformations. New suggestions, and new insights based on new discoveries, opened that tree in several branches and, why not, more trunks. Darwin’s drawing presented just one trunk, not three as Carl Woese put it in 1987, only without roots in the ground. There was not a singular and a unique origin.The discovery of the DNA molecule opened more and more possibilities and questions. Nobody was quiet or felt comfortable in the multitude of labs and seminars around the world. There, in the DNA molecule, there was something hidden, and that something (to me the very swerve of the story) was the discovery of the Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT). In a sentence: HGT meant that the tree wasn’t a tree, it was a hedge. There was not only vertical influence (mutations and so on) from parents to sons, but also horizontal influence among species.Genes are not only inherited from ancestors; in fact we receive them from viruses or bacteria that move around us. And this is happening all the time. So, what are we in the end? What are species?David Quammen has made a superb work in this book (390 pages before Notes). He interviewed numerous actors of this adventure movie. Some of them are dead, so Quammen looked for disciples and friends in order to complete his own tangled tree.I don’t know what is better in this narrative if the actors or the fascinating story the author tells us (he could have done it without this human element). Hard to say. Quammen is so good a narrator, one of those that go with you all the way through the end. He works for you! You almost not need to think. (Well, almost).Everything in this wonderful exposition of facts, heroes, battles, failures and successes, is intended to be clearly understood. Bottom line: evolution is happening but not as in a tree. Is occurring in parallel, everywhere and all the time. You’ll discover by yourself the richness and variety of life as you never saw it. This is new, this is what’s happening today in molecular biology.Now I’m going to read the last book by the same author, “Breathless.”And a final note: if you’re in doubt with respect to the dissonance that Quammen could have produced within the Darwinian Brotherhood, I would say, don’t worry. He has been welcomed by them.That’s how science works. Darwin would have been happy.

⭐The Tangled Tree revisits concepts of evolution to the reader introducing more modern ideas that have come out over the last 20-30 years from the current giants in the field. It is readable and informative and covers a lot of subject matter with a focus on origin of life ideas and means of evolution in early forms of life. It is quite biographical with a focus on Carl Woese but the book involves a lot of work by biologists, chemists and biophysicists.The Tangled Tree doesn’t really follow a clear path with clear goals for the book. It covers the figures who have updated our views of how life emerged and how evolution has occurred. The author discusses of course the Darwinian view of survival of the fittest and the original tree of life diagrams that figuratively shaped our intuition about the branching nature of biology but quickly moves on to how this is erroneous. The author spends a lot of time talking about Carl Woese who first proposed Archae as a separate branch of life and discussed the chemical traces that could be used to understand the relationships among biological units. The reader gets a sense of the techniques used in modern biology that took the field from looking qualitatively at structures to infer relationships to quantitatively analyzing biochemistry to understand divergences between chemical structures. With such methodological improvements the author weaves in the main concepts of the book which entail horizontal gene transfer. The main conceptual takeaways for the reader come from the idea that improvements in genome don’t happen through a clear survival of the fittest evolutionary process but rather that horizontal gene transfer is alive and well and how most genetic material at the single cell level has occurred and led to massive changes. Included in this concept is the inclusion of mitochondrial DNA in our own cells along with countless other examples. The author discusses the ideological battles fought on the relevance of horizontal gene transfer and whether its influence extended after life gained complexity but the consequence of horizontal gene transfer from a visual perspective is that the tree of life is more of a brambled bush. The author weaves together the lives of multiple scientists who worked on evolving our ideas on evolution and the origin of life, a lot centering on Carl Woese, but this is the story that carries the weight of the book.The Tangled Tree introduces ideas which have been around but still subordinated to the tree of life picture of evolution in an entertaining and readable form. The book is not structured particularly effectively and sometimes has sub chapters on the order of 1 page or so, as such the writing doesn’t often flow particularly well. Overall thought it is easy to follow and the content is conveyed. If one wants to read an entertaining account of our modern take on the tree of life, this is a worthwhile read.

⭐This is an unusual one for Quammen in that it features far less travel and getting out in the field, which you may or may not miss. It contains his trademark levity and enjoyment of a good scientific shit-storm but doesn’t have quite the same focus that his better works have (Song of the Dodo remains his genre-bending masterpiece, and Outbreak the epitome of what a good popular science book should be). It was still enjoyable, but I got the feeling that Quammen never quite found the over-arching narrative that would give the book the shape it needed, and I spent a substantial period of time thinking that he was trying very hard to avoid mentioning Dawkins’ Selfish Gene – which for all Dawkins’ later idiocies did provide a useful reminder that selection happens on many levels and which starts to unpick some of the claimed inconsistencies of horizontal gene transfer.This review sounds more negative than the book deserves. It’s still very readable and full of the usual surprising facts, but doesn’t scale the heights that Quammen is capable of – something that left me slightly disappointed.

⭐I am tempted to give this three star but since the biographical research is so good I’m giving it four. I was drawn in to read this book because of the blurb which insinuated that I would be told of recent work taking us back to LUCA.This is really a book around two main themes – a man, Carl Woese and a field of study -Horizontal Gene Transfer. It gives very little technical detai lbut is primarily interested in the people involved and goes backwards and forwards in time until you’ve almost lost track of what the point of it all was. But the biographical details of the many, many people involved is interesting and I did get the main thrust which is that Horizontal Gene Transfer is important. However it was unclear at the end as to how important this is to evolutionary theory – i.e. is is 90% or 10%? I suspect the answer is we just don’t know. i wonder if it relates to the ideas of punctuated equilibria that Steven Jay Gould used to support? What exactly is Richard Dawkins position on it all ? At the moment it seems there is a lot still unknown.

⭐Quammen’s extraordinary book, The Tangled Tree, chronicles the fascinating history of our understanding of the evolution of life on Earth – and especially how humans fit into it. Quammen’s path through this history is narrated through the lives of scientists, past and present, with strikingly personal, respectful, sympathetic and intelligent interviews with them, their families and their colleagues.Using this detailed research gleaned over 4 years of travel, study and interviews, Quammen guides us from Darwin’s early theories of evolution in which life branched like a tree to the latest discoveries suggesting a more appropriate analogy of The Web of Life. He explains in meticulous detail how molecular biology and phylogenics have pieced together the evolution of simple single-cell prokaryotes into complex multi-celled eukaryotes, and even suggests how the primeval chemical mix combined to form amino acids to create RNA – the basis of all life on Earth.And some of his revelations are truly stunning. Such as the discovery of endosymbiosis – the implications of which make us humans wonder exactly what and who we are. Especially when learning that 8% (one twelfth!) of the human genome is from retroviruses…..This complex subject is explained with such clarity and enthusiasm that I could not put the book down. And I didn’t want to finish it. I unreservedly recommend The Tangled Tree – if you read and absorb this book you will know more about the origins and evolution of life than 99.999% of the world’s population! If there were more than 5 stars I would award them.

⭐I’m not new to Quammen’s work. His Song of the Dodo is, to me, one of the great masterpieces of modern science writing and as a writer myself Quammen’s work is a standard to which I hope I will only one day meet. It goes without saying, then, that I came to The Tangled Tree with high expectations and I am pleased to say they have been exceeded. The book is a fascinating and compelling account of our understanding of the tree of life and, as the title suggests, how this is much more complicated – and tangled – than we might initially have expected. In short, the book tells the story of molecular phylogenetics, which is a new way of reading along and tracing the tree of life. It shows, for instance, that a sizeable percentage of the human genome comes not from traditional inheritance but sideways through infection by viruses.For many, I imagine, this book might be a disappointment (or pleasant surprise); unlike many more typical science books Quammen elects to tell his science through the lives of the scientists who made the discoveries in question. In many ways the book is as much a book on the history of science as it is on the science itself. Personally, and as someone who has training in both biology and in the history of science, I love this particular angle Quammen takes, but others might value a more straightforward approach. That said, the book is highly readable, full of surprising facts and superbly written. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in life, genetics and the history of one of science’s more important developments in recent years. Five stars.

⭐This was a fascinating book in many ways. It did manage to explain the science involved in a manner comprehensible to the, fairly, informed layman. However, I was interested in the topic itself rather than the biographic details of the scientists involved. I couldn’t care less about predilections for the saxophone, Harleys or paedophilia; I was interested in the science. A bit science lite.

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