Unraveling the Tangled Tree: A Revolutionary Look at the History of Life

j beck: Easy to understand explanation in a non-text book format of cellular development and very early evolution.

United States on Jul 20, 2023

Odysseus at homeOdysseus at home: "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...

United States on Nov 01, 2022

alapper: 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.

United Kingdom on Jun 02, 2021

Philip M: 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...

United Kingdom on Jun 08, 2020

Metazonk: First off all, it needs very good knowledge of the English language to read this book. I am talking English at work and at home every day, but still needed to look up the dictonary for some words I did not know.

If you expect compact new information about horizontal gnee transfer (which I initially did), you will be a bit dissapointed. But when I accepted that the book wants to tell a story about people and their groundbreaking findings, I really started to enjoy it and read it with plessure to its end.

The autor manages very well to abduct you into the world of evolutionary and genetic scientists and lets you see the world with their eyes. Doing that you will discover some very new and intersting details about evolution and will experience some surprises along this way, as they did.

It is a very good book,. The only reason for the 4 stars is, that I had expected more information and less story, but this si just a matter of personal taste.

Germany on Feb 02, 2020

David HDavid H: 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...

United Kingdom on Apr 10, 2019

DreadShips: 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.

United Kingdom on Nov 07, 2018

Perry Marshall: 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...

United States on Aug 24, 2018