It's Monday, October 22nd, 2018, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gantis.

And I'm Kishwar Hari. Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide. We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at inquiring. Show, on Twitter, at Inquiring Show, and on Facebook.

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by supporting us at patreon.com slash inquiring minds.

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So frequent listeners to our show will know that one of the topics that we love to

cover are topics that scientists have long thought were settled, but all of a sudden

are under turned.

That's one of my favorite aspects of the scientific method,

is that we're constantly re-evaluating what it is that we think we know when new data show up.

To that end, we also like to highlight scientists whose work has been kind of forgotten.

And so this week's interview is with David Kwan, who's a science writer. He's written 15 books.

He's also written for a lot of different publications like Harper's and the Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, etc. And he's a contributing writer for National Geographic.

He recently wrote a book called The Tangled Tree, a radical new history of life,

in which he discusses aspects of evolution

that are often left out of textbooks, at least in people's first encounter with, you know,

the theory of evolution. And mainly he focuses on the work of a scientist named Carl Woosie

and horizontal gene transfer. So this idea that we can actually,

in a sense, inherit traits, don't even know if inherit is the correct word, from other species

instead of just from our ancestors. Oh, this is a harken back to our conversations with Carl Zimmer,

...