Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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.