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David Quammen - The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

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Nonpareil science writer David Quammen explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology can change our understanding of evolution and lifes history, with powerful implications for human health and even our own human nature.
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 fieldthe study of lifes diversity and relatedness at the molecular levelis horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. It turns out that HGT has been widespread and important. For instance, we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infectiona type of HGT.
InTheTangled TreeDavid Quammen, one of that rare breed of science journalists who blends exploration with a talent for synthesis and storytelling (Nature), chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made themsuch 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.
Quammen is no ordinary writer. He is simply astonishing, one of that rare class of writer gifted with verve, ingenuity, humor, guts, and great heart (Elle). Now, inThe Tangled Tree, he explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of lifeincluding where we humans fit upon it. Thanks to new technologies such as CRISPR, we now have the ability to alter even our genetic compositionthrough sideways insertions, as nature has long been doing.The Tangled Treeis a brilliant guide to our transformed understanding of evolution, of lifes history, and of our own human nature.

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ALSO BY DAVID QUAMMEN

NONFICTION

Yellowstone

The Chimp and the River

Ebola

Spillover

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

Monster of God

The Song of the Dodo

ESSAYS

Natural Acts

The Boilerplate Rhino

Wild Thoughts from Wild Places

The Flight of the Iguana

FICTION

Blood Line

The Soul of Viktor Tronko

The Zolta Configuration

To Walk the Line

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Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

A Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Copyright 2018 by David Quammen

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

FirstThis Simon & Schuster hardcoverpaperback export edition August 2018

SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design by Lauren Peters-Coll Aer

Jacket image: background by Krasovski Dmitri / Shut Terstock; Plant by Dea / G.Dagli Orti / De Agostini / Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Quammen, David, 1948- author. Title: The tangled tree : a radical new history of life / David Quammen. Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018004356| ISBN 9781476776620 | ISBN 1476776628 | ISBN 9781476776644 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Phylogeny--Molecular aspects. Classification: LCC QH367.5 .Q36 2018 | DDC 591.3/8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004356

ISBN 978-1-4767-7662-0978-1-9821-0720-8

ISBN 978-1-4767-7664-4 (ebook)

To Dennis Hutchinson and David Roe, my attorneys of the soul

Contents
THREE SURPRISES

The Tangled Tree A Radical New History of Life - image 3

An Introduction

L ife in the universe, as far as we know, and no matter how vividly we may imagine otherwise, is a peculiar phenomenon confined to planet Earth. Theres plenty of speculation and probabilistic noodling, but zero evidence, to the contrary. The mathematical odds and chemical circumstances do seem to suggest that life should exist elsewhere. But the reality of such alternate life, if any, is so far unavailable for inspection. Its a guess, whereas earthly life is fact. Some astounding discovery of extraterrestrial beings, announced tomorrow, or next year, or long after your time and mine, may disprove this impression of Earths uniqueness. For now, though, its what we have: life is a story that has unfolded here only, on a relatively small sphere of rock in an inconspicuous corner of one middling galaxy. Its a story that, to the best of our knowledge, has occurred just once.

The shape of this story, in its broad outlines as well as its finer details, is therefore a matter of some interest.

What happened, over the course of roughly four billion years, to bring life from its primordial origins into the fluorescence of diversity and complexity we see now? How did it happen? By what concatenation of accident and determination did it yield creatures so wondrous as humansand blue whales, and tyrannosaurs, and giant sequoias? We know there have been crucial transitions in evolutionary history, improbable incidents of convergence, dead ends, mass extinctions, big events, and little ones with big consequencesincluding some fateful contingencies that have left behind evidence of their occurrence embedded subtly throughout the fossil record and the living world. Alter those few contingencies, as a thought experiment, and everything would be different. We wouldnt exist. Animals and plants wouldnt exist. Why did it happen as it did, and not some other way? Religions have their responses to such questions, but for science, the answers must be discovered and then supported with empirical evidence, not received in a holy trance.

This book is about a new method of telling that story, a new method of deducing it, and certain unexpected insights that have flowed from the new method. The method has a name: molecular phylogenetics. Wrinkle your nose at that fancy phrase, if you will, and Ill wrinkle with you, but, in fact, what it means is fairly simple: reading the deep history of life and the patterns of relatedness from the sequence of constituent units in certain long molecules, as those molecules exist today within living creatures. The molecules mainly in question are DNA, RNA, and a few select proteins. The constituent units are nucleotide bases and amino acidsmore definition of those to come. The unexpected insights have fundamentally reshaped what we think we know about lifes history and the functional parts of living beings, including ourselves. In particular, there have come three big surprises about who we arewe multicellular animals, more particularly we humansand what we are, and how life on our planet has evolved.

One of those three surprises involves an anomalous form of creature, a whole category of life, previously unsuspected and now known as the archaea. (Their name gets uppercased when used as a formal taxonomic category: Archaea.) Another is a mode of hereditary change that was also unsuspected, now called horizontal gene transfer. The third is a revelation, or anyway a strong likelihood, about our own deepest ancestry. We ourselveswe humansprobably come from creatures that, as recently as forty years ago, were unknown to exist.

The discovery and identification of the archaea, which had long been mistaken for subgroups of bacteria, revealed that present-day life at the microbial scale is very different from what science had previously depicted, and that the early history of life was very different too. The recognition of horizontal gene transfer (HGT, in the alphabet soup of the experts) as a widespread phenomenon has overturned the traditional certitude that genes flow only vertically, from parents to offspring, and cant be traded sideways across species boundaries. The latest news on archaea is that all animals, all plants, all fungi, and all other complex creatures composed of cells bearing DNA within nucleithat list includes ushave descended from these odd, ancient microbes. Maybe. Its a little like learning, with a jolt, that your great-great-great-grandfather came not from Lithuania but from Mars.

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