The Tree of Life
Solving Science's Greatest Puzzle
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'A DELIGHT' HENRY GEE
'BEAUTIFUL' THOMAS HALLIDAY
Where do we come from and how did we get here?
Come time-travelling through the history of every species that has ever lived with Professor Max Telford.
A four-billion-year journey through the evolution of our planet, The Tree of Life tells the fascinating story of the gigantic family tree that records the relationships between every living thing - from humans, fish and butterflies to oak trees, mushrooms and even bacteria.
Understanding how the amazing diversity of life on earth came to be is one of the greatest puzzles in biology. And this book, full of vivid and fascinating stories, takes you right inside: learn why grey wolves are more closely related to whales than to Tasmanian wolves; how geological change and environmental catastrophe left their marks on the genome; why we don't have tails but we are the only species with chins; and follow individual scientists down winding evolutionary byways and occasional dead ends in their attempts to solve this greatest of all puzzles. Along the way, we'll see how, far from being a dry representation of the dead, the tree of life is a living thing which constantly alters our perspective on the past, present and future of life on earth.
From Darwin's early sketches to the vast computer generated diagrams scientists are building today, The Tree of Life explains how we can know our family tree at all and tells the epic history of the various ways it's possible to be a living thing. This is our own very personal story that began with the tiny ancestor of all life billions of years ago and ends with you and me.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evolutionary biologist Telford explores in this captivating debut history how the diversity of life on Earth came to be. To unravel this complex story, Telford turns to life's evolutionary tree—the web of relationships between species, which scientists have been trying to piece together for centuries. He chronicles these efforts, from Charles Darwin's early sketches to the computer-generated models molecular biologists are building today, and explains that researchers have been able to trace back all life on earth to a common ancestor, a cell that lived about four billion years ago referred to as LUCA, or the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Telford zooms in on milestones in evolutionary history, like how insects got their wings, and highlights the nuances of the evolutionary process that can lead taxonomists astray (just because two organisms look and act alike doesn't necessarily mean they share a close relative). In the final section, Telford meticulously traces humans' evolutionary path, from mere cells to fish then apes, Neanderthals, and, eventually, Homo sapiens. While some sections read like a textbook, there are intriguing details throughout, such as the fact that dogs are more closely related to bats and whales than the now extinct Tasmanian wolf, which they resemble. Readers will be wowed.
