What if the Tree of Life isn't a tree? David Kwaman will be here to talk about his new book,

The Tangled Tree, a radical new history of life. Should a public school be run like a business?

Andrea Gabor will be here to talk about after the education wars. Plus, we'll talk about what we

and the wider world are reading. This is the Book Review Podcast from the New York Times. I'm Pamela

Paul. David Kwaman joins us now from his home office in Bozeman, Montana. His new book is called

The Tangled Tree, a radical new history of life. David, thanks so much for being here.

Pamela, great pleasure to talk with you. So let's start with the title. What is the Tangled Tree

or what was the tree before it got tangled? The untangled tree was the conventional tree of life.

The tree of life is a trope, an image that goes back deep in time, back to the book of Revelation,

where it was sort of a religious symbol. But beginning with Darwin, it was the image of the evolutionary

history of life on earth. Darwin himself suggested the tree as the graphic image of the way life has

arisen from a single origin, diverged, diversified, changed over time, dissent with modification,

branched apart, and resulted in the diversity of life on earth as we see it, the diversity being all,

the twigs and the branches and the canopy of the tree. That idea began as a very controversial one.

It's no longer at least among most people a controversy at all. And yet what you're saying in

this book is that it's also not quite accurate. Right. The tree of life is the history of evolution

is only controversial now in the sense that it's a rear guard orthodoxy. And beginning in the work

of my central character, Karl Wows, in the 1970s, but particularly in the 1990s, early 2000s, scientists

made some boggling discoveries that revealed to them among other things that the tree of life is not a

tree. It is a tangled, contorted, web-like, net-like intermingling of events, crossovers, and convergence,

divergence of lineages. The bush of life doesn't have the same rain.

The bush of life doesn't get it either because limbs on a bush don't converge. In the wild,

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