The Tangled Tree

by David Quammen

  “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.