Summary & Study Guide – The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

This book is a summary of “The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life,” by David Quammen.

One of the central insights in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was that life branched like a tree. Over a century later, scientists used DNA sequences to reexamine the history of life and found that the tree of life was tangled. Humans are likely descended from single-cell organisms which we didn’t know existed fifty years ago. Genes don’t just move vertically. They also pass laterally across species lines. Eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance, but sideways through viral infections. 

The Tangled Tree chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made them. It explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognition about the tangled tree of life.

Read this book to get a new understanding of evolution and the history of life.

This guide includes:

* Book Summary—helps you understand the key concepts.

* Online Videos—cover the concepts in more depth.

Value-added from this guide:

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