Nilesh Jasani's Reviews > The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

The Tangled Tree is a well-written book on a complex, important and unexplored topic.

Darwinian evolution through mutations and natural selection is taken as the standard and complete theory, in the same vein as Newtonian mechanics in the 19th century. The evolutionary reality is not only far more complex but also different as the author patiently and comprehensively sets to prove in this book. The issues involved are complex. The claims need be revealed only after bringing readers up to date on the minimum required knowledge, and the author is a master at setting such a base before he thrusts topics like Endosymbiosis, Horizontal Gene Transfer, Horizontal Transposon Transfer, Endogenous Retroviruses etc. Genetic science discoveries are upending almost every tenet of the phylogeny or phylogenetic tree that scientists believed in for a century post-Darwin. 

With the tales of prominent personalities involved in the field, the author keeps the subject light and digestible for readers new to the concepts. The chronological back and forth is jarring at times, but the writing style and the narrative arc help simplify many extremely complex topics. The book is a great read to understand that evolution as we have known is just not what truly happened. In fact, horizontal gene transfer dominated a large part of the evolution of life in the early stages rather than the natural selection. And, HGT is likely not only playing an important role in natural spheres but critical for the medicinal sciences.