The Tangled Tree Quotes

“Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.” There’s a nice word: ramifications. It’s especially good in this context because, while the literal definition is “a structure formed of branches,” from the Latin ramus, of course the looser definition is “implications.” Darwin’s tree certainly had implications.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“The result will be gradual transmutation of heritable forms, and adaptation to circumstances, by a process of selective culling. Eventually he gave the crank a name: natural selection. Twenty years passed after the E notebook entry. The world heard nothing about natural selection.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“Habitat doesn’t replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“[...] la scienza stessa, per quanto precisa e oggettiva, è un'attività umana. È un modo non soltanto di conoscere, ma di interrogarsi. È un processo, non un corpo di fatti o di leggi. Come la musica, la poesia, il baseball e le partite a scacchi dei grandi maestri, è qualcosa di meravigliosamente imperfetto fatto dalle persone, su cui si riconoscono dappertutto le impronte sbavate della nostra umanità.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“Inheritance, variation, overpopulation. He saw how they fit. Put those three together and turn the crank: you’ll get differential survival,”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“The ribosome did not contain the recipe for the protein; it was a tape reader. It could make any protein so long as it was fed the right tape of “messenger” RNA.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“Darwin wrote: “organized beings represent a tree.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“molecular phylogenetics.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life