New Books Network Max Telford, "The Tree of Life: Solving Science's Greatest Puzzle" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
Jan 30, 2026
Max Telford, an evolutionary biologist at UCL and author of The Tree of Life, guides listeners through four billion years of life's branching history. He explains how modern genetics and old fossils map relationships, reveals surprising kinships like insects as crustaceans, and explores big questions from the origin of backbones to why humans lost tails.
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Tree Of Life As Global Genealogy
- The Tree of Life is a giant genealogy linking every species back to a single ancestral population called LUCA.
- It represents branching speciation events and inherited characters that define groups across deep time.
Include Fossils By Scoring Shared Characters
- Use fossils to place extinct species into the tree by scoring the same anatomical characters as in living taxa.
- Classify fossils just like living organisms to reconstruct fossil branches and their relationships.
DNA Is Powerful But Poorly Fossilized
- DNA yields huge numbers of characters useful for inferring relationships, but it rarely survives fossilization.
- Molecular data work best for living species; deep-time fossils lack retrievable ancient genomes.
