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The Tangled Tree

By David Quammen

  • On the Origin of Species -- Charles Darwin, 1859
    • Natural selection (survival of the fittest)
  • Symbiosis - that one cell could absorb something like a bacteria and begin to use it as its own organ (symbiogenesis -- merging of two separate organisms)
    • Chloroplasts (diatoms)
    • mitochondria
    • flagella and cilia
    • all eukaryotic cells
  • Molecular phylogenetics
  • Prokaryotic (Proks) - cells that don't have nuclei
  • Eukaryotic (Euks) - cells that do have nuclei
  • Archaea (methanogens -- organisms around thermal underwater vents)
  • Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) / Lateral Gene Transfer (LGT)
  • A reticulated tree
  • Transferable resitance factors (antibiotic resistence)