“I gave myself to this labor”: ibid., 284.
“a hypochrondriac of the first rank”: Lawrence (1972), 21.
“dismissed” from the Conway pastorate: ibid., 24.
“exclude a Deity from its creation”: ibid., 25.
“We know nothing of Mr. Lyell’s religious creed”: ibid., 29.
“a higher organization” had been inserted: Archibald (2009), 573.
“is perfectly explained by the changing condition”: ibid., 575.
Darwin read it in early autumn 1838—“for amusement”: Darwin (1958), 120.
“the warring of the species as inference from Malthus”: Barrett (1987), 375.
“One may say there is a force”: ibid., 375–76.
“the grand crush of population”: ibid., 399.
repeatedly to what he now called “my theory”: ibid., 397–99, 409.
It presented the theory as “one long argument”: Darwin (1859), 459.
“Natural selection . . . leads to divergence of character”: ibid., 128.
“ . . . have sometimes been represented by a great tree”: ibid., 129.
“The green and budding twigs may represent”: ibid., 129–30.
“It is well to take heed to the opinions”: Archibald (2009), 575–76.
PART II: A Separate Form of Life
“It has not escaped our notice”: Watson and Crick (1953), 737.
“his method of working was to talk loudly”: Ridley (2006), 86, quoting David Blow.
His talk “commanded the meeting”: Judson (1979), 333.
“probably his most remarkable paper”: Ridley (2006), 104.
“Biologists should realize that before long”: Crick (1958), 142.
“vast amounts of evolutionary information”: ibid.
they called it “chemical paleogenetics”: Zuckerkandl and Pauling (1965a), 97.
“Why don’t you work on hemoglobin?”: Morgan (1998), 161–62.
“most influential of Pauling’s later career”: ibid., 172.
what you have is “a molecular evolutionary clock”: Zuckerkandl and Pauling (1965a), 148.
“one of the simplest and most powerful concepts”: Morgan (1998), 155.
Crick himself later judged it “a very important idea”: ibid., 155–56.
“branching of molecular phylogenetic trees”: Zuckerkandl and Pauling (1965a), 101.
and not just what he called the “cryptographic aspect”: Woese (1965a), 1546.
“I differed from the whole lot of them”: Woese (2007), 2.
“A universal tree would therefore hold the secret”: Sapp (2009), 156.
“A slight diversion in my research program”: Woese (2007), 2.
“Dear Francis,” he wrote, “I’m about to make”: Woese to Crick, June 24, 1969. Woese Archives, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
“unravel the course of events” leading to the origin: ibid.
“backward in time by a billion years or so”: ibid.
“There is a possibility, though not a certainty”: ibid.
allow him to deduce the “ancient ancestor sequences”: ibid.
“The obvious choice of molecules here”: ibid.
under their previous name, microsomal particles: Crick (1958), 147.
“I feel . . . that the RNA components of the machine”: Woese to Crick, June 24, 1969.
“What I propose to do is not elegant science”: ibid.
“Here is where I’d be particularly grateful”: ibid.
distinguishing variant forms of a molecule by “fingerprinting”: Morgan (1998), 161, n. 34.
“My work had sort of come to a climax”: Browntree (2014), 132.
“A knighthood makes you different, doesn’t it”: “Frederick Sanger: Sequencing Insulin,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Sanger#Sequencing_insulin.
“It was routine work, boring, but demanding”: Woese (2007), 1.
“There were days . . . when I would walk home”: ibid.
“other professors just liked to hear” . . . “he felt it took him away from his real love”: Luehrsen (2014), 217.
“he plopped me down in his office”: ibid., 218.
“What a mess that often was!”: ibid.
Woese “just chuckled and said not to worry”: ibid.
“disentangling almost everything that was correct”: Bulloch (1938), 192.
“entirely modern in its character and expression”: ibid.
“Chaos” was the name of the group: Breed (1928), 143.
“the abiding intellectual scandal of bacteriology”: Stanier and van Niel (1962), 17.
“probably represents the greatest single evolutionary discontinuity”: Stanier et al. (1963), 85.
“Any good biologist finds it intellectually distressing”: Stanier and van Niel (1962), 17.
“elaborate taxonomic proposal” they had published: ibid.
“Many, many years ago I often went around” . . . “During those periods”: Sapp (2005), 295.
dismissed that as “a fourteen-syllable monstrosity”: Woese (2007), 3.
“screamed out” their membership in the prokaryotes: ibid.
a “signature” sequence in all prokaryotes: ibid., 6.
“What was going on?”: ibid.
“Then it dawned on me”: ibid., 7.
his “out-of-biology” experience: ibid., 4.
“burst into my room in the adjoining lab”: Sapp (2009), 166.
“proclaiming that we had found a new form of life”: George Fox, “Remembering Carl,” “Carl R. Woese Guest Book” (of posthumous remembrances), Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology online, last modified January 13, 2013, www.igb.illinois.edu/woese-guest-book.
“George was always skeptical,” Woese himself wrote: Woese (2007), 4.
they seemed to “jump off the page”: George Fox to Jan Sapp, January 24, 2005, quoted in Sapp (2009), 167.
a wonderfully named substance called “mine-slime”: Wanger et al. (2008), 325.
“Carl’s voice was full of disbelief”: Wolfe (1991). 13.
“We went into fast-forward mode”: Woese (2007), 4.
“a rare opportunity to put the theory of evolution”: ibid.
“Testing these two main evolutionary predications”: ibid.
“should in principle be definable”: Zuckerkandl and Pauling (1965a), 101.
didn’t look much like “typical” bacteria: Balch et al. (1977), 305.
“the most ancient phylogenetic event”: ibid.
“These organisms . . . appear to be only distantly related”: Fox et al. (1977), 4537.
“There exists a third kingdom”: Woese and Fox (1977a), 5089.
“These organisms love an atmosphere of hydrogen”: Washington Post, November 3, 1977.
a paper on what Woese called a “ratchet” mechanism: Woese (1970).
“Scientists studying the evolution of primitive organisms”: New York Times, November 3, 1977, 1.
“Ralph, you must dissociate yourself from this nonsense”: Wolfe (2006), 3.
“I wanted to crawl under something and hide”: ibid.
“Ralph marched him into my office”: Woese (2007), 5.
“In my whole career I had never paid attention to lipids”: ibid., 6.
“if unusual cell walls meant anything”: ibid., 5.
“A Third Reich?” he snapped: Sapp (2009), 210.
“We are about to embark on a scientific meeting”: Woese (1982), in Kandler, ed. (1982), 2.
“Generations of failure had discouraged the microbiologist”: ibid.
“hopefully divert biology to some extent”: ibid.
“Woese and especially Wolfe were not in top physical shape”: Wolfe (2006), 7.
PART III: Mergers and Acquisitions
rejected by “fifteen or so” other journals: Margulis (1998), 29.
“On the Origin of Mitosing Cells”: Sagan (1967).
“probably represents the single greatest evolutionary
discontinuity”: ibid., quoting Stanier et al. (1963), 85.
“This paper presents a theory”: ibid., 226.
a “bad student,” by her own account: the quoted words come from Lake (2011), an obituary, but Margulis herself gives a similar and fuller account in Margulis (1998), 15–16.
“I was a scientific ignoramus,” she would recall: Margulis (1998), 16.
“a fine teacher—the best of my whole career”: Eric Goldscheider, “Evolution Revolution,” On Wisconsin 110, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 46, https://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/features/evolution-revolution/6.
“endosymbiosis must again be considered seriously”: Ris and Plaut (1962), 390.
“I was interested in evolution”: quoted in Keller (1986), 47.
“At Berkeley,” she recalled, “there was absolutely no relationship”: Margulis (1998), 26–27.
called Merezhkowsky’s proposal “an entertaining fantasy”: Wilson (1925), 738–39.
she would call Sagan “unbelievably self-centered”: Goldscheider, “Evolution Revolution,” 46.
“a torture chamber shared with children”: Poundstone (1999), 47.
to her it was “a move of convenience”: ibid., 70.
“Enforced home leave permitted uninterrupted thought”: Margulis (1998), 29.
“sprouted, expanded, and eventually was pruned”: ibid., 29–30.
“I typed late into many nights”: ibid., 30.
“Merezhkowsky’s career was unsettled”: Sapp et al. (2002), 416.
“the origin of organisms by the combination”: Merezhkowsky (1920), quoted in ibid., 425.
“would be somewhat reminiscent of a symbiosis”: quoted in ibid., 419.
in what he called “a completely spontaneous way”: quoted in ibid.
“organs” of each cell, which had “gradually differentiated”: Martin (1999) translation of Merezhkowsky (1905), 288.
they are “foreign bodies, foreign organisms”: ibid., 289.
“Let us imagine a palm tree”: ibid., 292.
those docile “green slaves,” the chloroplasts: ibid.
“I have no doubt that it would immediately lie down”: ibid., 292–93.
featuring a “seven-dimension oscillating universe”: Sapp et al. (2002), 432.
“The Plant as a Symbiotic Complex”: cited in Khakhina (1992), 48.
It warned: “Do not enter my room”: Sapp et al. (2002), 435.
just a bit of money given “from time to time”: Wallin (1927), ix–x.
an intimate and “absolute” symbiosis: Wallin (1923b), 68, 71.
“the fundamental principle controlling the origin of species”: Wallin (1927), 146–47.
a third force, an “unknown principle”: ibid., 147.
“Dr. Wallin’s writings stirred up much interest”: Eliot (1971), 138.
Ivan E. Wallin “asks us to believe”: Gatenby (1928), 165.
called them “certainly defunct”: Lange (1966), quoted in Margulis (1970), 45.
may have come straight from the spirochete: Margulis (1981), 16.
“Every major concept in this book”: ibid., 67.
“advice, encouragement, and much unpublished data”: Bonen and Doolittle (1975), 2314.
That is, he said: “AAA, UUG, AAG”: the full sequence appears in Carbon et al. (1978), 155, fig. 2.
“Has the Endosymbiont Hypothesis Been Proven?”: Gray and Doolittle (1982).
In 1985 his lab published a paper titled “Mitochondrial Origins”: Yang et al. (1985).
calling it a “false-flag operation”: “College and University Professors Question the 9/11 Commission Report,” http://patriotsquestion911.com/professors.html.
“We don’t ask anyone to accept Williamson’s ideas”: “Butterfly Paper Bust-up,” Nature online, last modified December 24, 2009, www.nature.com/news/2009/091224/full/news.2009.1162.html.
called her “science’s unruly Earth Mother”: Mann (1991), headline.
“I quit my job as a wife twice”: quoted in Martin Weil, “Lynn Margulis, Leading Evolutionary Biologist, Dies at 73,” Washington Post, November 26, 2011.
“Rather,” they wrote, “the important transmitted variation”: Margulis and Sagan (2002), 12.
they become in effect “plant-animal hybrids”: ibid., 13.
“The evolutionary biologists believe the evolutionary pattern”: Dick Teresi (2011), “Discover Interview: Lynn Margulis Says She’s Not Controversial, She’s Right,” Discover, April 2011.
“There’s a role in science for iconoclasts”: quoted in Mann (1991), 4.
“I greatly admire Lynn Margulis’s sheer courage”: John Brockman, Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 129.
“If I hear her say it again, I’m going to sue her”: he told Sapp, and Sapp told me: interview, July 6, 2015.
what he preferred to call the three great “domains” of life: Woese et al. (1990).
“If you wish merely a complimentary letter”: Carl Woese to Dean Nicholas at Chicago, January 14, 1991, Woese Archives, University of Illinois, Chapaign-Urbana.
PART IV: Big Tree
“one of the most magnificent works which I have ever seen”: Darwin to Haeckel, March 3, 1864, in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 12, 61.
“proper evaluation of nature required”: Richards (2008), 22.
“horrible worms, rickets, scrofula, and eye diseases”: ibid., 42.
a dancing seventeen-year-old “elf”: ibid., 50.
“true German child of the forest”: ibid.
Haeckel called Messina “the Eldorado of zoology”: ibid., 63.
“with just a few months left for his research in Italy”: ibid.
“He had no choice”: ibid., 79.
her “German Darwin-man”: Haeckel to Darwin, August 10, 1864, in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 12, 485.
“The whole natural system of plants and animals”: Haeckel (1863), quoted in Richards (2008), 94–95.
“the victorious rush of an Apollonian youth”: ibid., 83, and n. 12, quoting Furbringer (1914).
what he called his “religion of monism”: ibid., 11.
a whole edifice of “natural laws”: Haeckel (1880).
“stuffed with as many lawlike proposals”: Richards (2008), 120.
“I lived then quite like a hermit”: quoted in Gliboff (2008), 171.
“It contains the foundation for all”: Richards (2008), 117.
what Schleicher called a “Darwinian” theory: ibid., 126, 159.
“the chief source of the world’s knowledge of Darwinism”: ibid., 2, 223.
his subtitle, The Developmental History of Man: ibid., 140.
“superficial, inconsistent and just plain muddleheaded”: Kelly (1981), quoted in ibid., 263.
Haeckel was “Darwinian in name alone”: Bowler (1988), 72.
all the “pseudo-Darwinians” and “anti-Darwinians”: ibid., 47, 76.
“the essentially linear character of Haeckel’s evolutionism”: ibid., 87.
a plant ecologist at Cornell University for whom “broad classification”: Hagen (2012), 67.
a personality that some colleagues would later call “stoic” and “intense”: Westman and Peet (1985), 7, 10.
with blurry boundaries and a “low degree of reality”: Hagen (2012), 68.
“Ecologists are familiar with divisions of the living world”: Whittaker (1957), 536.
“The kingdoms are man’s classifications”: ibid., 537.
“These themes are inconsistent,” he admitted: Whittaker (1959), 223.
“Recent work has made more evident the profound differences”: Whittaker (1969), 151.
lay in the idea of “ancient cellular symbioses”: ibid.
polyphyletic taxa are “unwelcome”: Whittaker and Margulis (1978), 6.
in November 1977, of “a third kingdom of life”: Woese and Fox (1977), 5089.
in correspondence with Fox and others, was “big tree”: Carl Woese to George Fo
x, November 16, 1977; courtesy of George Fox.
“Please give big tree the top priority”: ibid.
“For at least a century, microbiologists have attempted”: typescript of “Big Tree,” version 1, courtesy of George Fox. All other typescript versions, likewise courtesy of George Fox.
“A revolution is occurring in bacterial taxonomy”: typescript of “Big Tree,” version 7.
Woese wrote to Fox about several “potential points of conflict”: Woese to Fox, August 27, 1979. Woese Archives, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
The eukaryotic cell “is now recognized to be a genetic chimera”: Fox et al. (1980), 458.
its members would be “eocytes”: Lake et al. (1984), 3786.
“all your proposal does is muddy the waters”: quoted in Sapp (2009), 247.
“Your apparent need to have there be a new kingdom”: ibid., 248.
“the battle of the kingdom keepers”: ibid., 249.
dismissed the whole episode as a “ridiculous intermezzo”: quoted in ibid., 251.
“The cell is basically an historical document”: Woese (1987), 222.
“The certainty that progenotes existed”: ibid., 263.
“The progenote today is the end of an evolutionary trail”: ibid., 264.
“Someday you and I must write”: Woese to Kandler, February 11, 1980; in the Woese Archives, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
“The First Workshop on Archaebacteria”: its Proceedings were published as Kandler et al. (1982).
“As time goes by it becomes more and more obvious”: Woese to Zillig, June 3, 1989; in the Woese Archives, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
“I have no objections if Mark becomes a coauthor”: Kandler to Woese, January 5, 1990; in Kandler Papers, University of Munich; as quoted in Sapp (2009), 386.
The word archaebacteria should now disappear: Woese et al. (1990), 4578.
PART V: Infective Heredity
“very shy and aloof and difficult to get to know”: Pollock (1970), 11.
“could do more with a kerosene tin and a primus stove”: quoted in Downie (1972), 2, from Wright (1941), 588. Downie capitalizes Palace but Wright did not.
“there seems to be no alternative to the hypothesis of transformation”: Griffith (1928), 154.
“actually make use of the products of the dead culture”: ibid., 150.
The Tangled Tree Page 41