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480 pages, Hardcover
First published August 14, 2018
Species: it's a collective entity but a discrete one, like a club with a fixed membership list. The lines between this species and that one don't blur.Unaware that these ideas are now considered wrong, I was interested in Quammen's review of how our understanding of evolution has been significantly revised by research on DNA, RNA and the discoveries of, among other things, archaea and horizontal gene transfer (HGT), mostly all since I took high school biology in the 1970s.
Individual: an organism is also discrete, with a unitary identity. There's a brown dog named Rufus, there's an elephant with extraordinary tusks, there's a human known as Charles Robert Darwin.
Tree: inheritance flows always vertically from ancestor to descendant, always branching and diverging, never converging. So the history of life is shaped like a tree.
Now we know that each of those three categoricals is wrong.
"Science itself, however precise and objective, is a human activity. It's a way of wondering as well as a way of knowing. It's a process, not a body of facts or laws. Like music, like poetry, like baseball, like grandmaster chess, it's something gloriously imperfect that people do. The smudgy fingerprints of our humanness are all over it." - David Quammen in The Tangled Tree