David Quammen-Author of The Tangled Tree A Radical New History of Life- Shifting Our Perception of Evolutionary History
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2018
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Currently ranked number 12 on the New York Times Best Seller list and recently featured on NPR and the Wall Street Journal, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life offers a riveting account of evolutionary history that's challenging the way we've understood it for over 100 years.
The author, David Quammen, joins the podcast today for an intriguing and informative conversation about some of the ideas explored in his book, including the recently discovered phenomenon of horizontal gene transfer across species boundaries, how retroviral DNA has inserted itself and continues to function in the human genome, and how the processes of bacterial transduction and transformation have led to the global epidemic of antibiotic resistance.
Available on Amazon, Audible, Kindle, and in your local bookstore, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life is a must-read book, not just for science experts, but for anyone interested in the mysteries of science and the history of life. Hit play to learn more.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:07.0 | Future Technologies is to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used. |
| 0:17.0 | Or just around the corner, for Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, |
| 0:21.0 | 3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more. |
| 0:25.0 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech Podcasts. My guest today is author David Kwanman. He's recently come out with a book called The Tangled Tree |
| 0:36.4 | A Radical New History of Life. The book was featured on NPR, The Wall Street Journal in New York Times, |
| 0:42.3 | and it's ranked pretty highly I believe it's |
| 0:44.4 | 275 and in terms of all new books out there so I bought it and I've been listening to |
| 0:50.3 | it and a few chapters in but I wanted to talk to you about it David so how you doing |
| 0:54.0 | very good rich nice to be on the podcast which I appreciate it so what |
| 0:58.6 | what spurred you to write this book and what's the the book about for people that don't know yet? |
| 1:03.6 | Well the book is about the idea of the tree of life as the picture of |
| 1:08.9 | evolutionary history on earth that goes back to Charles Darwin who said that you know the idea of the |
| 1:17.6 | tree of life had been around it was sort of a religious image but Darwin turned it |
| 1:21.7 | into an evolutionary image with the trunk of the tree representing the single source for all life and then the big limbs branching away and then the smaller branches and finally twigs representing how |
| 1:35.8 | biological diversity has come to be on this planet. |
| 1:39.3 | Always branching, always diverging to the point where at the top of the tree you've got tiny twigs and the leaves the canopy |
| 1:47.0 | representing the diversity of life on earth but the reason I wrote the book is because that |
| 1:51.5 | image that Darwinian image of the tree of life has been |
| 1:54.9 | radically challenged in the last 40 years by discoveries from genome sequencing that are still |
| 2:02.3 | completely in tune with the general |
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