num_pages: 480
description: 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.David Quammen 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.
language: English
title: The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
publisher: Simon & Schuster