The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life in Science and Inquiry

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The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

David Quammen

Start date: February 1, 2019

Finish date: February 28, 2019

Discussion: Book Club 2019

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Book Club 2019

December 2019 - Uninhabitable Earth
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last updated Dec 21, 2020 08:09AM

November 2019 - Invisible Women
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Sep 05, 2018 Charlene rated it liked it

Shelves: biography, evolution, origins-of-life, biology, history

I feel so disappointed. It was like being a kid and getting a half eaten chocolate Santa on Christmas as your only gift. This seems like a book half written. When I got the the end, I just sat there in completely disbelief. Some parts of this book are exceptional. For example, this is an incredibly detailed and informative history of how scientists and the public came to understand the tree of life, how our understanding changed to see it as a web, and finally, merely a starting point with no sh I feel so disappointed. It was like being a kid and getting a half eaten chocolate Santa on Christmas as your only gift. This seems like a book half written. When I got the the end, I just sat there in completely disbelief. Some parts of this book are exceptional. For example, this is an incredibly detailed and informative history of how scientists and the public came to understand the tree of life, how our understanding changed to see it as a web, and finally, merely a starting point with no shape. In many ways, biology mimics physics in this regard. Newton gave us the laws of the universe that work very well on the larger scale, but when you dig deeper, it is clear that the very small has quantum rules all its own. A similar thing is going on with the tree of life. The tree Darwin played around with works very well for later evolved species. We can, with great success, trace our ancestry back to earlier branches. However, when we get to the earliest species on the tree, archaea and bacteria, there was so much horizontal gene transfer (bacteria and archaea swapping genes instead of handing them down through generation) that we cannot trace a universal common ancestor. This story needed to be told. The only problem is, this story really wasn't told completely! And what a shame. Parts of this story never made it onto the page. This seems to be because Quammen wanted to focus on a biography of Carl Woese. Woese was a pioneer who discovered archaea and fought for their place on the tangled tree. He went to war with giants like Lynn Margulis, George Fox, and so many others. All of that was essential to include. However, there was a shocking turn of events when Quammen wrote about visiting Bill Martin (who he refers to as William F. Martin, and not Bill, which seemed odd to begin with). It was almost as if Quammen didn't really understand the work Martin has devoted his life to. Quammen talked about endosymbiosis being a single event; so he understood that part of Martin's research. He even discussed hydrothermal vents, but not in relation to Martin's work and discussed it so very briefly and it was clear he wasn't making the connections he was supposed to. He wrote about Martin and then *immediately* discussed that Woese guess that the RNA world is the correct hypothesis of how the first cells came to assemble. Did this just not come up when he spoke with Martin? I find that almost impossible to fathom. I find Qaummen not having read Martin, Russell, or Lane's work on the origin of life almost an impossibility. But yet, it seems he really wasn't familiar with it. Quammen went so far as to say he thought Woese was probably right about the RNA world. He then said that other people disagree but didn't say *how* they disagree. He never talked about Martin, Russell, and Lane's work (among others) who accounted for the energy needed for the cells to assemble. He never quite showed an understanding of how the hydrothermal vent hypothesis (or other processes that focus on the laws of thermodynamics and can show how free energy was available for the assembly of RNA, DNA, amino acids, fats, etc) challenge the RNA world hypothesis (and for damn good reason). I kept thinking, "Oh he must be saving Martin's objections to the RNA world for later in the book." Later never came.

There is too much missing in this extremely important story to rate this book well. How we view the tree is extremely important. So, I appreciate how much detail was included. There are incredible sections about the work of Margulis. She really got her due in this book. Quammen wrote about the things she got right and what she got wrong, but he had equal respect for her and her male peers. I don't find this is always the case and was extremely happy to see how he managed her story. His sections of horizontal gene transfer were some of the most important sections included in this book (but probably could have been done better). His depiction of the many fights people had over the tree (is it a web, 5 kingdoms, 3 domains), and if we should even call archaea bacteria (no, we should not) were great. The sections on Darwin, and even Woese hatred for Darwin, were wonderful. Jumping genes and how they created a womb were all top notch, and things the public really needs to know. Quammen even included exciting little tidbits, such as how sponges can be both a multicellular organism and yet a single cell organisms if the environment dictates (but this really lacked the wow factor that other writers have managed to capture) or the tale of wolbachia, one of my very favorite bacteria, who control the sex of the new wolbachia produced (again, told in much more captivating manner by Ed Yong, who Quammen recommends reading, as do I).

But none of his spectacular writing made up for the loss of what was missing from this story. I appreciate that Quammen chose this topic at all. But, I was left feeling like I do when I read a NYT science article that picked up the ball and ran with it before it was ready. When I finished this book, I found myself wishing, so desperately, that Nick Lane had chosen to write about this subject. It would have been a much better (more complete) book.
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Oct 23, 2019 Kathleen rated it liked it

I learned some new things but it was a long slog. Quammen starts out strong on horizontal gene transfer and the tree of life analogy. He gets sidetracked by a fascination with Carl Woese that I don't get. The more I learned about him, the less I liked him. I think what I learned was that genetic variation may be as much from HGT as from random mutations, but the book doesn't go there. Quammen seems to go down a weird "species aren't real" rabbit hole. ...more

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Feb 01, 2020 Deanna Necula rated it it was ok

Enough about the damn tree. Perhaps I came at this with more of a scientific bent rather than an eye for the historical details, but this book is a web of mind-numbing historical crumbs that obscure the scientific value. And the tree! I get it鈥檚 a book about the tree of life, but the author fell in love with this metaphor and took it to high heaven. Incredibly repetitive. I really wanted to like this book, and it was impeccably well-researched, but nearly 200 pages too long (200 pages in is wher ...more

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