Summary of David Quammen's The Tangled Tree

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 Charles Darwin kept a secret notebook that he used to record his wildest ideas. He believed that the forms of living creatures weren’t eternally stable, but had changed over time.

#2 Darwin had begun thinking about evolution, and had begun writing down his ideas in a notebook. He had read Zoonomia, a medical treatise written by his grandfather, which contained some provocative musings about how all warm-blooded animals had evolved from one living filament.

#3 Darwin was a young man when he began writing about his ideas on evolution. He noticed patterns in the world around him, and he wondered if there was a law of adaptation at work.

#4 The tree of life was a venerable idea in 1837, and Darwin could adapt it to his purposes as an evolutionary theorist. He drew a sketch of a three-branched coral of life, with the inanimate lower sections.