by David Quammen
Quammen narrates how Carl Woese's ribosomal-RNA work, Lynn Margulis's endosymbiosis theory, and the discovery of horizontal gene transfer have shattered Darwin's neatly branching tree of life. The result is a 'tangled tree' where whole genomes cross species lines, rewriting the history of evolution and even the composition of our own cells.
In this collection, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life references 4 other books.
It draws on The Origin of Species, The Double Helix and The Selfish Gene.
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Quammen opens with Darwin's famous 'I think' tree sketch from On the Origin of Species and frames the book as a challenge to Darwin's strictly bifurcating genealogy of life.
The book revisits Watson's The Double Helix as the origin point of the molecular biology revolution that Woese would later turn on taxonomy itself.
Quammen engages Dawkins's gene-centric view from The Selfish Gene, arguing that horizontal gene transfer complicates any simple picture of 'selfish' genes riding in vertically inherited lineages.
Mukherjee's The Gene is discussed as a parallel recent history of heredity that Quammen's tangled-tree narrative extends into the deep evolutionary past.
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Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.
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Charlie Munger
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
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