Part I:
Chapter 1-2
- Review of Darwin’s early life
Chapter 3
- p. 10 - Quammen cites Revelations, the last book of the New Testament as an early example of the phrase “tree of life”. The King James version of Revelations 22:1-2 reads:
- And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb
- In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there** the tree of life**, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of nations.
- See this passage per the New International Version
- In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle organizes animals as a ladder with no mention of trees. Aristotle’s linear “ladder of nature” is later Latinized to scala naturae. By the Middle Ages, this Neo-Platonic ladder is also called the Great Chain of Being, the Ladder of Ascent, and the Descent of the Intellect. (p. 10-11)
- Charles Bonnet, an 18th-century Swiss naturalist, wrote a treatise on insects that vertically arranges an ‘Idea of a Scale of Natural Beings’, “ascending from fire, air, and water, through earth and various minerals, upward to mushrooms, lichens, plants, and then sea anemones, followed by tapeworms and snails and slugs, upward further to fish and then flying fish in particular, and then birds, above which came bats and flying squirrels, then four-legged mammals, monkeys, apes, and lastly man.”
- Notably, Bonnet ignored microbes, even though van Leeuwenhoek had discovered them about 70 years before. (p. 11)
- By the late 1700s and the early 1800s, the old linear tree was less satisfactory because the Age of Discovery and many for collecting and organizing had led to an explosion of species to catalog.
- “Scholars wanted to set that explosive abundance of new facts within hierarchical categories so that it could be easily accessed and used. This wasn’t evolutionary thinking; it was just data management. (p. 12)
- 1801, Augustin Augier wrote in 1801 that “a figure like a genealogical tree appears to be the most proper to grasp the order and gradation” of the diversity of plants. (p. 13)
- In Augier’s book was a figure representing his new system for cataloging plants: “an arbre botanique (botanical tree).”
- “Augier was no evolutionist before his time. His natural order wasn’t meant to suggest that all plants had descended from common ancestors by some sort of material process of transformation.”
- “Augier’s contribution…was discovering [the Creator’s] proportions and progressions–design principles that had satisfied the Deity’s neat sense of pattern–and using them after the fact to organize botanical knowledge into a tidy system.”
- Carl Linnaeus published the first edition of his System Naturae in 1735. (p. 15-16)
- Fifty years after Linnaeus challeneged Linnaeus’ “overly neat system for cataloging plants” based on flower structures, stamens, pistils etc. as being too much about one single character (from a phenetic point of view).
- Augustin conceded that “‘Stamen number is a striking character but not when it comes to the examination of plants’…i.e., stamen number is not always unambiguous and therefore not reliable as a basis for organizing the great jumble of botanical life.”
- Augustin offered a distinct plant organization system “using multiple characters for different levels of sorting and to resolve the ambiguities and fine gradations.”
- But to be clear, this was all a cataloguing system; the trees depicted were definitiely not genealogies or phylogenies. No common descent or movement/change through time.
Chapter 4
- Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Edward Hitchcock
- Lamarck believed in the fixity of species until about 1797, perhaps from his studies of mollusks. p.18
- Although Lamarck’s ideas about acquired characteristics etc. were somewhat forgotten by the mid-1800s, they were revived in the late 19th century. After The Origin of Species was published, there was wider acceptance of the fact of evolution but much less acceptance of the Darwinian mechanism of evolution by natural selection. In this environment, Lamarckian adaptationism gained popularity as an alternative means of evolution.
- In addition to his concept of inheritance by acquired characteristics, Lamarck believed in “spontaneous generation; he disbelieved in extinction at least as a natural process; he argueed that ‘subtle fluids’, surging through the bodies of living creatures, helped reshape them adaptively.” (p. 19)
- “In one of his earlier botanical works,…Lamarck had arranged plants in what he called the ‘true order of radation’: from least perfect and complete to most, ascending along an old-fashioned ladder of life.” (p. 19)
- “Lamarck matched his [ladder of plants] with a separate ladder for animals, showing an ascending series of forms: from worms, through insects, through fish, and amphibians and birds, to mammals.” (p. 20)
- However, the separate ladders he had for plants and animals were each linear; there was no Lamarckian tree of life or anything similar until the1809 publication of his Philsophie Zoologique which did include a dotted line version of a rudimentary, suggestive, potential tree of life. (p. 20)
Chapter 5 (p. 21 - 25)
- Edward Hitchcock published Elementary Geology in 1840 which had 2 separate trees of life; one for animals, another for plants. (p. 21)
- See what these trees look like on p. 23–they look more like a bed of seaweed rather than a spreading tree like a maple or oak tree.
- p. 24 - 25. Within his Elementary Geology, Hitchcock included charts that showed the “changes in Earth’s flor and fauna over geological time with this or that group of plants or animals waxing or waning in diversity and abundance, but not much branching of one from antoher.”
- Hitchock: “The cause of these changes was God’s direct agency, adding and subtracting creatures, improving and perfecting the world as a long-term project. The major groups [of organisms] were present all along…but new species manifesting a ‘higher organization’ had been inserted along the way until at last Earth was ready for ‘more perfect’ kinds of creatures, ‘the most generally perfect of all with man at their head.’”
- “The gradual introduction of ‘higher races is perfectly explained by the changing condition of the earth which being adapted for the more perfect races Divine Wisdom introduced them’. These were special creations by the Deity, appropriate as environments changed.”
- “God wasn’t rethinking the planet’s fauna and flora [as Lamarck suggested]. Rather, He was adjusting [creatures] to newly available niches.”
- Hitchcock’s Elementary Geology was a best seller, goig through thirty editions / reprintings over 2 decades.
- However, the 31st edition of Elementary Geology in 1860 contained a notable change––for the first time, the tree diagrams from earlier editions had been removed. Quammen posits that this is because in 1859, Darwin published The Origin with its single dangerous branching diagram. (p. 25)
- “Hitchcock was born to a poor family in Deerfield, MA, his father a Revolutionary War veteran and a hatter by trade, with debts and three sons, who found just enough money to see his boys through primary school and some time at the local academy. Hitchock balked at the idea of apprenticing to his father the hatter or in other trades…Instead, he worked on a farm for uncounted years.”
- “With his free time on rainy days or evenings, young Edward studied the classics and the sciences including Astronomy.” In 1811, an eighteen-year-old Hitchcock observed the great comet in the northern sky.
- A health crisis brought a religious conversion from Unitarianism to Congregationalism. He was hired at the age of 23 to be principal of Deerfield Academy; he also became a pastor at a Congregationalist Church in Conway MA.
- Later, Hitchcock served as a professor (teaching natural history, geology, chemistry, and theology) and administrator at Amherst College.
- While at Amherst, he read Lyell’s Principles of Geology as each volume was published from 1830-33 and was “disturbed” by Lyell’s arguments for uniformitarianism which contrasted with the earlier theory of repeated God-caused catastrophes through history.
Chapter 6
Chapter 8
- “Darwin and Darwin’s followers owned the tree image now. It would remain the best graphic representation of life’s history, evolution through time, the origins of diversity and adaptation, until the late twentieth century…[until Woese and other scientists] would discover: oops no, it’s wrong.” (p. 34)
Part III: Mergers and Acquisitions
Part IV: Big Tree
Part V: Infective Heredity
Part VI: Topiary
Part VII: E Pluribus Human