Tree of life

The concept was commonly used for centuries to represent order in nature, but it is dying.  Except in school, where your kid is forced to learn it. From Nathalie Gontier’s “Depicting the Tree of Life: the Philosophical and Historical Roots of Evolutionary Tree Diagrams” (Evolution: Education and Outreach, 19 August, 2011 ), we learn, It is a popularly held view that Darwin was the first author to draw a phylogenetic tree diagram. However, as is the case with most popular beliefs, this one also does not hold true. Firstly, Darwin never called his diagram of common descent a tree. Secondly, even before Darwin, tree diagrams were used by a variety of philosophical, religious, and secular scholars to depict phenomena such Read More ›

A topic that (in 1997) was largely the province of one lonely ID philosopher of biology, namely, How would we know if the theory of universal common descent were false? began to bubble away in the literature. Carl Woese published his broadside “The universal ancestor” in PNAS in 1998, saying there never was such an organism, and then the hydrant opened. [ … ] W. Ford Doolitle, Michael Syvanen, Elliott Sober, Malcolm Gordon (at UCLA), and others said, in major publications, “Hey, what if there never was a single Tree of Life? What then?” And the genomics revolution turned up an array of anomalies wholly unanticipated when I started on my dissertation (e.g., the appearance of widespread lateral gene transfer, Read More ›