BOOKS ET AL.

MICROBIOLOGY throughout the book and continues to plague

bacterial classification.
The Trouble with Trees A more fundamental problem is horizon-
tal gene transfer. Bacteria (and archaea too)
W. P. Hanage are notoriously promiscuous and can take up
DNA with scant regard for the boundaries

I
t has been said before, but it bears repeat- bacteria). It is now thought that the Archaea of named species. Horizontal transfer raises
ing: evolutionary biology has been devel- are more closely related to us humans than severe questions about any analysis that is
oped, almost without exception “by sex- they are to bacteria. This finding shook tax- based on phylogeny because different genes
ually reproducing eukaryotes, for sexually onomy to its foundations. in a single organism can have different histo-
reproducing eukaryotes” (1). Given that the It is always easier to convince your fel- ries. Although the book raises in passing the
vast majority of living things on this planet, low scientists of something they think they notion that the tree of life should be replaced
both in numbers and biomass, are not sexu- know already. Woese’s work was emphati- by something like a worldwide web of life,
ally reproducing eukaryotes, this might be cally not in this category, and much of Sapp’s neither the evidence for this web nor its
considered an oversight. Jan Sapp certainly story describes the rocky road to its accep- implications are considered in any depth—
thinks so. In The New Foundations tance. Few obstacles were despite that fact that it strikes at the very
of Evolution: On the Tree of Life, greater than the opposi- heart of the phylogenetic approach to clas-

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The New Foundations
he gives us a history of microbiol- of Evolution tion of Ernst Mayr, which sification championed by Woese. It is churl-
ogy, from Leeuwenhoek to modern- On the Tree of Life
Sapp describes in some ish to complain too much, because the debate
day disputes, taking an evolutionary detail. Although Mayr rec- about horizontal gene transfer and the tree of
perspective. by Jan Sapp ognized that finding the life is far from settled. But the topic deserves
Sapp (an evolutionary biolo- Oxford University Press, Archaea was “like discov- a more thorough treatment than Sapp affords
gist and historian of science at York New York, 2009. 445 pp. $99, ering a new continent” (2), it, if only because it is so fundamental to evo-
University, Toronto) recounts how £54. ISBN 9780195388497. the great biologist argued lutionary microbiology.
microbiological thinking developed Paper, $39.95, £27.50. that when it came to clas- My other concern is that in several places
in almost total isolation from evolu- ISBN 9780195388503. sification, phylogeny was the author describes prokaryotic evolution
tion until the 1970s. That is when the irrelevant in the face of (with its high rate of horizontal gene transfer
comparison of 16S rRNA sequences became such a stark difference as the presence or and the uncoupling of sex from reproduction)
possible, allowing the phylogeny of species absence of a membrane-bound nucleus that as “non-Darwinian”—this stretches to the
to be readily estimated. More closely related contained chromosomes. If a cell had such a publisher’s claim on its Web site that the book
species have more similar 16S sequences, nucleus, it was a eukaryote, and if not, it was “puts forth a new theory on evolution,” which
because there has been less time for them to a prokaryote. This was all that was required it emphatically does not. Given that evolu-
diverge. When the new methods were applied for “an information storage and retrieval sys- tion even among archaea and bacteria is still
to bacteria, the results completely upset pre- tem” (2), which was to Mayr the purpose based on the generation of variation, which is
vious taxonomy, which had been based on of classification. From the viewpoint of the winnowed by selection and then inherited, I
relatively crude metabolic tests and morphol- present day, Mayr comes across as small- would argue Darwin was substantially right.
ogy. It also revealed the previously unimag- minded, with a classical biologist’s ignorance Or more right than one could reasonably
ined diversity of single-celled life. of microbiology. But his position offers a fine expect given that he had no conception of the
The heroes of Sapp’s book (because it illustration of the tension between theoreti- gene and little knowledge of bacteria.
is that kind of history) are Carl Woese and cal consistency and pragmatism, which runs That Sapp makes his story so sparkling is
his colleagues, who first pressed the 16S
sequence into service. Their most remark- Plantae Fungi Animalia Bacteria
able discovery concerned an obscure group
of bacteria typically isolated from environ-
ments characterized by, for example, very
high temperature or salt concentrations. (I
say obscure because they were far from the
driving concerns of medicine and industry.)
Archaea
Together with the methanogens, they were
the first examples of what came to be known
as the Archaea. Although they superficially
resembled bacteria (being single-celled and
CREDIT: (LEFT) AFTER (3); (RIGHT) AFTER (4)

lacking a nucleus), these organisms had a dis-

tinctively different metabolism, cell wall, and Protista
transcription machinery. In time, they came to
be recognized as a whole new domain of life Monera
alongside eukaryotes and eubacteria (“true” Eucarya

The reviewer is at the Department of Infectious Disease Epi-

demiology, Imperial College London, London W2 1PG, UK. Two views of life. A five-kingdom system based on three levels of organization [after R. H. Whittaker
E-mail: w.hanage@imperial.ac.uk (3)] and a three-domain phylogenetic tree [after Norman Pace (4)].

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 327 5 FEBRUARY 2010 645

Published by AAAS
BOOKS ET AL.

nuclear weapons. He is right to point to

an achievement all the more impressive when
one remembers he must include a fair amount
of taxonomy, both antiquated and modern. The
debates and disputes that animate his account
remain current today. Most microbiologists
still do not know very much about evolution-
ary biology, and vice versa. Nevertheless, the
tide of microbial genomes is changing this
state of affairs. In order to know where we are
going, it is helpful to reflect on how we came
to be where we are. We all carry with us intel-
lectual baggage and preconceptions from not
only our own experiences but also those of our
friends, colleagues, and mentors. Perhaps the
highest compliment I can pay The New Foun-
dations of Evolution is that having read it, I
new world war even without the presence of
nuclear weapons.
the traps that absolutist rhetoric about
nuclear threats can create. The clas-
sic example is, of course, the war in
Iraq. Whatever the actual motives for
the war were, the 2003 U.S. invasion
could hardly have happened without
widespread acceptance of the Bush
administration’s claim that Saddam
Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear
weapons program. More generally, by
focusing not on how close we came to
nuclear war but rather on the limitations
on the use of nuclear weapons, Mueller pro-
vides an unusual and fruitful perspective on
nuclear history.
The book also contains much to disagree

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feel that I better understand the minds of my In the book’s second part, Mueller argues
fellow microbiologists—and even my own. that nuclear proliferation is both less likely
and less dangerous than many political lead-
References ers and analysts believe. Nuclear weapons are
1. B. R. Levin, C. T. Bergstrom, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
97, 6981 (2000). largely useless, and that is why most states
2. E. Mayr, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 95, 9720 (1998). do not want them. The Nuclear Non-Prolif-
3. R. H. Whittaker, Science 163, 150 (1969). eration Treaty has not had a very great effect,
4. N. R. Pace, Science 276, 734 (1997).
he claims. U.S. efforts to stop the spread of
10.1126/science.1185784 nuclear weapons by imposing sanctions, issu-
ing threats, and even, as in the case of Iraq,
NUCLEAR WEAPONS going to war have only served to enhance the
appeal of nuclear weapons for some states.
Fearful Distractions Nuclear weapons, he points out, have killed
fewer people than the wars undertaken to stop
David Holloway nuclear proliferation.
The third and final part of the book
with. Like the alarmists he criticizes, Muel-
ler overstates his case. To take just two exam-
ples: It is certainly plausible that a Cold War
would have broken out between the Soviet
Union and the United States because they
were rivals in shaping the postwar world,
but it is not convincing to say that nuclear
weapons were essentially irrelevant to inter-
national politics. The political leaders of the
nuclear powers thought very seriously about
the weapons and their implications, espe-
cially after the development of the hydrogen
bomb, and their ideas about the use of nuclear
weapons for deterrence and coercion shaped
the way they conducted policy.
Or consider Mueller’s treatment of the

A
tomic Obsession is a contrarian book. deals with the threat of nuclear terrorism, 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of
John Mueller argues that Americans which, Mueller claims, has been greatly Nuclear Weapons. He is rightly skeptical
have worried too much about nuclear exaggerated: “any notion that the actual al- about claims that without the Non-Prolifera-
weapons and that their unwarranted anxiet- Qaeda enemy has the capacity to come up tion Treaty we would today have many more
ies have led to costly and dangerous policies. with nuclear weapons, even if it wanted to, nuclear states than now exist. Most states, he
Often witty and acerbic, his book offers a cri- looks far-fetched in the extreme, as does the rightly notes, do not want nuclear weapons.
tique of those who like to echo notion that they could effec- They are not champing at the bit to develop
the words of the Fat Boy in tively handle a pilfered one or them. They are, however, not indifferent to
Atomic Obsession
The Pickwick Papers: “I wants one given them by a state.” A the behavior of other states, and the fact that
Nuclear Alarmism from
to make your flesh creep.” nuclear terrorist attack on the all but three states signed the treaty shows
Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda
In Mueller’s view, we should United States, catastrophic how widely the norm of nonproliferation
look with a much cooler eye at by John Mueller though it would be, would not is accepted, even if some signatory states
nuclear weapons and the dan- Oxford University Press, lead to the extinction of the have organized clandestine nuclear weapon
gers they present. New York, 2010. 336 pp. United States, as many have programs. The treaty provides an element
According to Mueller (a $27.95, £16.99. 9780195381368. loosely asserted. It would be of predictability about the nuclear behavior
CREDIT: FWIS DESIGN/COURTESY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

political scientist at Ohio State very different from the mas- of other states as well as early warning of
University), the atomic obses- sive Soviet nuclear strike that attempts to go nuclear.
sion has existed since Hiroshima. In the first figured in Cold War scenarios. Mueller’s chief purpose in this thought-
part of the book, he contends that the bomb Mueller fears that hyperbolic rhetoric provoking book is to analyze rather than to
has had little impact on international politics. about nuclear threats is counterproductive in provide policy proposals. His main recom-
The Cold War would have happened any- at least two ways. In the first place, it gives mendation concerns North Korea and Iran.
way, and it would have taken the same basic encouragement to al-Qaeda. Second, it raises He has “nothing against making nonprolif-
form. The memory of World War II and the obstacles to thinking in a sensible and bal- eration a high priority,” he writes, but there is
devastation it caused would have prevented a anced way about allocating resources to meet a higher one: “avoiding policies that can lead
the threats the United States faces. to the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands
There is much to agree with in the book. of people under the obsessive sway of worst-
The reviewer is at the Center for International Security and
Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305– Mueller performs an important service in case scenario fantasies.”
6055, USA. E-mail: hollowdj@stanford.edu puncturing some of the inflated rhetoric about 10.1126/science.1186122

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Published by AAAS