The Tangled Tree

E-kniha

In this New York Times bestseller and longlist nominee for the National Book Award, ';our greatest living chronicler of the natural world' (The New York Times), David Quammen explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology affect our understanding of evolution and life's history.

In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new fieldthe study of life's diversity and relatedness at the molecular levelis horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines.

It turns out that HGT has been widespread and important; we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived sideways by viral infectiona type of HGT.