The tangled tree
by David Quammen · first published 2018
14mentions
11recommended by
14HN commenters
2018–2025first – last mentioned
79% recommend21% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Popular history of how biologists overturned the tree of life, tracing Woese's discovery of Archaea and the role of horizontal gene transfer; suits general science readers who want the story behind the ideas.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
…Bill Martin, who was a rival to Woese, which is fine, but the result is a story in which Martin made all the major discoveries and Woese literally gets one sentence. I'd strongly recommend Quammen's "The Tangled Tree" instead, which is a more balanced book.
on “What a Newfound Kingdom Means for the Tree of Life” ↗…people think that mutations related to our rapid evolutionary increase in brain size may have been in part down to zoonotic virus exposure a couple million years ago. edit: Maybe you would enjoy The Tangled Tree by David Quammen.
on “ACT Test Scores Drop to Lowest Levels in More Than 30 Years” ↗…"species" (trickier to define for bacteria in any case), but it is becoming more widely recognized that lateral gene exchange happens a lot in all organisms. A recent popular book on the subject is "The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life" by David Quammen.
on “Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Our DNA (2017)” ↗+1 for the book! Just finished it a couple of weeks ago. And if you liked that, consider The Tangled Tree by David Quammen.
on “First Confirmed Denisovan Skull Piece Found” ↗A fascinating article. David Quammen's book "The Tangled Tree: A Radical History of Life" also has stories how DNA changes through more mechanisms than just mutation.
on “'Useless specks of dust' turn out to be building blocks of vertebrate genomes” ↗If you enjoyed this article but your biology background is from the 1990's or early 2000's, you might check out The Tangled Tree (2018) by Quammen https://bookshop.org/books/the-tangled-tree-a-radical-new-hi... It traces how we got to some of these new ideas from pre-Darwin, through Lynn Margulis, to present day nanopore sequencers…
on “Scientists learn more about enigmatic archaea (2021)” ↗I really like The Tangled Tree by Quammen, The Song of The Cell by Mukherjee, and Utopia or Oblivion by Fuller. Just some books that are staring at me from my work desk. Edit: oh and in big history, Earth Transformed by Frankopan…
on “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari” ↗I strongly recommend "The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life" by David Quammen The old metaphor of a tree of life has completely broken down with crosslinks everywhere at all levels, far beyond what even Barbara McClintock wrote…
on “Researchers find a new organelle evolving” ↗They don't kind of look like bacteria, there was a lot of gene sequencing and careful examination because it seemed like a very wild theory especially before we've really learned archaea. Quammen's "The Tangled Tree" has a nice writeup on on the process.
If this is interesting to you, I just started reading "Tangled Tree" [1] which examines the history of phylogeny and molecular bio and the current state if the art, I recommend it. I want to go home and read it right now but alas, work. (lo I'm on HN, but also WFH, modern…
on “Rare microbes lead scientists to discover new branch on the tree of life” ↗For people interested in this kind of work, I recommend The Tangled Tree, the biography of Carl Woese, who discovered Archaea: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/books/review/david-quamme... Evolution is interesting but up and down from this level of the tree of life too.…
on “What a Newfound Kingdom Means for the Tree of Life” ↗…forcefully refutes the notion of racial or ethnic categories as having any meaning over the lifetime of our species. Simply put, humans have migrated a lot and interbred with whoever. Your ancestry is a "tangled tree" (to borrow Quammen's term https://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Tree-Radical-History-Life/dp/...)
on “Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times” ↗…The deep history of ourselves : the four-billion-year story of how we got conscious brains by Joseph LeDoux. Bit disappointed in this one, it seemed like there should have been a better story here. The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life: David Quammen. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. Makes CS careers look less appealing.
on “Ask HN: What Are You Reading?” ↗This is an interesting article about horizontal gene transfer, but the title is horrible, very horrible. I propose to change the title to the title of the book "The Tangled Tree". The evolutionary tree is like 99% correct for animals. Bacterias and Arqueas are more messy. Plants are weird, really weird, with lot's of viable hybrids and even more strange things. If it were a…
on “Is Darwin wrong on how we pass our DNA from one generation to the next?” ↗