David Quammen, "The Tangled Tree"

David Quammen discusses his book, "The Tangled Tree", at Politics and Prose on 8/15/18.

Darwin famously described evolution as an elegantly branching tree of life. But as scientists have pursued molecular phylogenetics—the process of "reading the deep history of life and the patterns of relatedness” from DNA sequences—they’ve found that nature is more complicated, that life’s branches cross and converge and tangle in previously unsuspected ways. Quammen, the author of more than a dozen books of popular science, including Spillover and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, explains how the study of DNA led to the key discovery of horizontal gene transfer: that genes can be transmitted between organisms that aren’t parent and offspring; outlines its implications; and profiles the lives and work of its principal researchers, including Carl Woese, Lynn Margulis, and Tsutomu Watanabe.

David Quammen’s fifteen books include The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. He has written for Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, Outside, and Powder, among other magazines, and is a contributing writer for National Geographic. He wrote the entire text of the May 2016 issue of National Geographic on the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem—the first time in the history of the magazine that an issue was single-authored. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, an environmental historian, along with two Russian wolfhounds and a cross-eyed cat. Visit him at DavidQuammen.com.

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Produced by Tom Warren