Description
Darwin presented the evolution of life as branched like a tree. This idea has been upended by evolutionary biology through studying life’s diversity and relatedness at the molecular level using DNA sequences. This reexamination of the history of all life has replaced Darwin's branching tree with a much more complex maze of branches.
In The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen weaves together the stories of scientists and their genetic discoveries as they built a new view of the history of life that shows that DNA can be passed not between individuals but between species.
According to one reviewer, the book is “A masterful history of a new field of molecular biology . . . . [An] impressive account of perhaps the most unheralded scientific revolution of the 20th century. . . . A consistently engaging collection of vivid portraits of brilliant, driven, quarrelsome scientists in the process of dramatically altering the fundamentals of evolution, illuminated by the author's insightful commentary.”
The book is well-written and the SDG should be a joy for those who are interested in new developments in evolutionary biology.
Weekly Topics
Week one- The Greeks and the beginning of Alchemy
Week two -The Dark Ages and Medieval times, Paracelsus
Week three - Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes and Bacon
Week four - Boyle, Newton, Van Helmont, and Scheele
Week five - Phlogiston and the work of Becher, Stahl, Priestley, Cavendish and Lavoisier
Week six - Dalton and the Atom, Chemistry in the late 18th and early 19th Century
Week seven - Mendeleyev and the development of the PeriodicTable
Bibliography
Strathern, Paul, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements, Thomas Dunne Books, 2001
Additional Reading
Scerri, Eric, The Periodic Table: Its story and Its Significance, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2019
