The tangled tree: a radical new history of life

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 field -- the study of life's diversity and relatedness at the molecular level -- is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. We now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection -- a type of HGT. David Quammen chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made them: 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 explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life, including where we humans fit upon it. Thanks to new technologies such as CRISPR, we now have the ability to alter even our genetic composition -- through sideways insertions, as nature has long been doing. The Tangled Tree is a guide to our transformed understanding of evolution, of life's history, and of our own human nature.