Sitting at his desk in London, zoologist Max Telford of University College London only has a couple of trees outside his window and an apple on his desk as examples of diverse living things. But up the road in Regent’s Park, he explained how he could look around at several trees, grasses, mushrooms, and birds; if he dug in the soil, he would find a plethora of worms, slugs, and thousands of microbes. “Even in central London, a little looking [or] a little digging around will just show you just how incredibly diverse life is,” Telford said.
Telford thinks a lot about this diversity and how organisms evolved. In his research, he combs through genetic data and mathematical models to determine when new animals, namely invertebrates, split off from an ancestor and created a new branch on the tree of life. He compared this tree to a time machine to study evolution. “Essentially, knowing the tree of life allows you to tell the history of life on Earth,” he said.
Recently, Telford translated the highlights of a technical, ambitious field and his own work into a popular science book, The Tree of Life: Solving Science’s Greatest Puzzle. In it, he brings readers into the world of phylogenetics and takes them on a journey from the start of life to humans today and the history in between.
Translating Research for the General Reader
As a popular science reader himself, Telford wanted to write such a book, though originally, he thought he would write about genetics. However, when a journal editor told him that a review on the tree of life was too ambitious because the idea was a book itself, Telford agreed and pivoted his plans to write just that.
Max Telford drew on his passion for popular science books, writing, and the tree of life itself to bring his research and the field of phylogenetics to general readers.
Francesca Telford
Telford said he started with the evidence—genetics and fossil records—that researchers like himself use to determine that there is in fact one tree of life and where organisms fit onto it. “It’s certainly not just animals. It's not just genes. It's not just familiar animals. It's the whole of life: It's fossils; it’s molecules; it’s morphology. There’s an awful lot to it,” he said. In the book, he explains what a synapomorphy is, the history of studying life on Earth, and the concept of convergent evolution and how it complicates phylogeny efforts.
To help illustrate these concepts and the technical approaches that researchers use to build the tree of life, Telford drew upon examples from his own research. However, to explore work from the fields beyond his own area of expertise, like paleontology, embryology, and the origin of eukaryotes, Telford said, “I spent a lot of time in libraries. I spent a lot of time staring at my computer and reading stuff.”
Inspired by the book and subsequent television show Life on Earth, Telford took readers back to the beginning of the tree of life and followed the journey to the evolution of humans, exploring the characteristics that appeared along the way. At the end, Telford explored what the future, and inevitable end, of life on Earth may look like.
A Researcher’s Aims for Reader Takeaways
Reflecting on his experience translating his work for the non-expert to read and enjoy, Telford said that he watched his writing become more interesting and more “popular” with each draft. “You can start spotting when you're telling stuff that just is not necessary and is going to induce torpor in the reader,” he said. As he researched, read, and wrote his book, Telford also found himself thinking more deeply about the topics he worked on as well as adjacent subjects and seeing connections between them.
With the book released into the wild, Telford also shared that his primary goals were to convey that there was a tree of life that relates all organisms on Earth and to share how researchers build this model and address problems with it. “There is a history to life that goes back billions of years that shows how all the different life on Earth comes from a single seed and has sprouted up over four billion years.”
Not only can studying the tree of life give readers a sense of the past, but the same skills help people today. Telford explained how the same techniques researchers use to determine how distantly related two organisms are are the same processes used to track variants of viruses like COVID-19.
However, for Telford, there is plenty to appreciate in phylogeny on its own that he wanted to share with readers. “Life is utterly fascinating and understanding where life came from and how we ended up with this extraordinary diversity of life on Earth is, for me, that's one of the most interesting topics I can imagine,” he said.
