Some will criticize this book because of its subtitle makes a bold claim: “A radical new history of life.” A reviewer in the Wall Street Journal, for example, was a little grumpy and took pains to reiterate that Darwin’s theory of natural selection safely remains the central pillar of biology, thank you very much.
Well, OK… but saying “evolution by natural selection” is sort of like saying “Super Bowl via playoffs.” It may outline the process of competition and elimination, but it doesn’t tell you *anything* about the strategy that got the team to the Super Bowl! It only diverts your attention away from all the interesting details.
What is just now coming to the surface, arguably 20 years late, is the immensely sophisticated systems that drive evolutionary change, as discovered by people like Carl Woese, Lynn Margulis and Barbara McClintock.
The story focuses on the late Carl Woese, in fact it’s very nearly a full biography of the man. So… why should anyone care about Carl Woese? And why should anyone even give consideration to the suggestion that he was as great a scientist as Darwin?
The answer is that Woese flipped Darwin’s tree of life 90 degrees in 1977. Any time someone introduces that large of a conceptual revolution to a field, that person is a titan. Woese showed that inheritance is a vast interconnected web and that Darwin’s cherished tree metaphor has not minor, but major failings.
Woese showed that Horizontal Gene Transfer - large sections of DNA being transferred wholesale, from viruses and bacteria to other bacteria and plants and animals - is a *major* component of evolution, and in fact the history of life cannot be properly understood at all without it.
This is as big of a deal to biology as quantum mechanics was to Newtonian physics. It transforms the speed of evolution, from millions of years to, in some cases, hours and minutes.
It shows that organisms find very clever ways to incorporate very large chunks of code, obtained from elsewhere, into their physiology. Who knew that a large stretch of code stolen from a retrovirus was used to build the human placenta?
It changes genetics. It changes disease treatment. It changes genetic engineering and informs our use of gene editing technologies like CRISPR. It changes the whole history of evolution and alters the very definition of inheritance. It even raises deep questions about how purposeful and directional evolutionary systems actually are.
At the end of the book, Quammen even points out that three fundamental concepts in biology have gone from sharp to blurry:
-The definition of "species." Inheritance itself is not something that comes only from traditional ancestors, it comes from a whole mosaic of sources.
-There is no precise definition of gene; every man, woman and child supposedly knows what genes are, of course, but when you get right down to it, it’s a very squishy term.
-There’s not even a precise definition of an individual! Cell for cell, 90% of a human being is symbiotic bacteria. Every sophisticated organism on earth is a mosaic of cells within cells, organisms within organisms. Chloroplasts and mitochondria are symbiotic cells living inside of our own cells. They have their own DNA and Carl Woese was instrumental in proving that.
Quammen takes us on a historical tour of the fascinating scientists who quietly turned evolutionary theory sideways and upside down. Carl Woese was resentful of Darwin and thought himself to be a superior scientist. Quammen himself doesn’t go that far… but there’s a strong case to be made that Woese, Margulis, McClintock and a man named Fred Doolittle contributed vastly more to our understanding of the *detailed strategy* of evolution than Darwin ever did or even could have.
This conceptual revolution has already been well known inside of biology for years, but the public is only beginning to hear about it. This book joins a chorus of “post-Neo-Darwinian” books. Others include:
Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity by Denis Noble; COSMOSAPIENS by John Hands; Evolution: A View from the 21st Century by James Shapiro; Purpose and Desire by J. Scott Turner; Acquiring Genomes by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan; Symbiogenesis: A New Theory of Evolution by Boris Kozo-Polyanski, Lynn Margulis and Victor Fet; The Music of Life by Denis Noble; I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong.
The book has about 100 very short chapters and is easily read in small doses. You can get something out of this book in as little as 3 minutes at a time. He’s wrapped the often dry technical details of hard science in the bacon of storytelling about odd and fascinating science personalities - including drinking, parties, jazz, and Woese getting tossed in the bushes of his own back yard.
Most books on the evolution bookshelf in the typical bookstore are frankly 20 years out of date and more than a little misleading. The real story of evolution is far more fascinating and “The Tangled Tree” offers a much more accurate and current take on the state of the science.
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Wonderful
"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.
Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2018
Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2022
"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.
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.
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Top reviews from other countries
Erminio
Stato libro: OTTIMO. Venditore serissimo e affidabile. Assolutamente consigliabile.
Reviewed in Italy on November 16, 2023Adriano Sanches Melo
A biologia não cabe em caixinhas
Reviewed in Brazil on February 7, 2021
juan antonio montaraz
Interesante revisión, o reinterpretación de Darwion
Reviewed in Mexico on January 28, 2019