Dr. Martin Freiberg writes:
“I wanted to construct LifeGate in such a way that all species are of equal value, and that the incredible diversity of species can really be experienced and understood,” Dr. Freiberg explained.
LifeGate 2022 contains more than 150,000 photographs and more than 12,000 distinct phylogenetic trees.
The map view provides different levels of taxonomic detail and can be navigated by zooming between the following color-coded taxonomic levels: domain, phylum (the starting point of the map), class, order, family, genus, and species.
The surface area of a taxonomic group is relative to the number of its species — more species rich clades are represented with a larger area.
For instance, there are more than twice as many ant species in the family Formicidae than in the whole class of mammals.
Within a group, taxa are arranged so as to reflect their phylogenetic relationships.
Taxa with fewer species (often constituting relict taxa of phylogenetically older branches) have been placed to the lower left corner of their respective edge. Only living taxa are shown.
For the individual taxon, additional information can be retrieved, including phylogenetic trees.
Many of the cells have already been filled with photographs showing a representative of the respective taxon.
“During its creation, I based it on the family trees of nature,” Dr. Freiberg said.
“Biologists describe the phylogenetic evolution and relationships of living organisms in so-called phylogenies.”
“Only modern phylogenies already based on DNA analyses have found a place in LifeGate.”
“Such representations are usually limited to individual groups of species and show only birds or frogs, only begonias, orchids or only butterflies, for example.”
“I’ve brought the phylogenies together, in painstaking detail for the first time, so that the relationship positions of all species can actually be shown at the same time.”
“LifeGate began as a scientific clarification project for my students,” he added.
“Pictures are more memorable than mere numbers and make the topic of biodiversity more accessible. This is why the map also fascinates amateurs and laypeople. Not only biologists go to the zoo.”
Sci News
Classifying living organisms based on their inherent similarities is often assumed to form a “phylogenetic tree,” branching out from a common ancestor via evolutionary principles. Leaving aside, as much as possible, the personal bias or preference one may have for evolution or intelligent design, which model most compellingly fits the data? Other issues will certainly factor into the answer, but for now, what can be said about the topic of this article?
played around with it for about an hour–pretty cool………
A few notes:
Not much good on an Android phone, unfortunately.
Much better on a bigger screen.
Unfortunately, mechanisms produce patterns. And evolution by means of blind and mindless processes wouldn’t produce a tree. Heck, given starting populations of prokaryotes, blind and mindless processes can only produce variations of more prokaryotes. Universal common descent can’t even get started.
The ability to answer questions of descent become easier and easier.
Somehow I doubt the pattern actually discerned will not come close to supporting any form of naturalized Evolution. Where did all those proteins come from? How do they actually work together? Begging the question, the current logical fallacy, will just provide more excuses for nonsense.
The map is lovely, and a joy to navigate once one catches on to a few tricks. One is to pick a genus you know and love, and then to zoom out by clicking on “family” or some higher taxon to get a bird’s eye view of the surrounding terrain.
I used the genus Zaglossus, the long beaked echidna that is critically endangered in all three species and is not nearly as well known as Tachyglossus, the short beaked echidna that has been successfully bred by zoos.
But when I zoomed out, I discovered a weakness: it does not do a good job of enabling one to reconstruct the Tree of Life. Juxtaposed with Monotremata are Lepidosauria (lizards and snakes — so far so good) and Marsupilia. Still OK, but the colored dividing lines between marsupials and placentals are thicker than the ones between marsupials and monotremes. This suggests the discredited Marsupionta hypothesis that marsupials are more closely related to monotremes than to placentals.
Even if all such mistakes can be eliminated, the “map” depiction is much harder to grasp than the phylogenetic tree depiction of phylogeny. Could someone modify the software used to generate the map to produce a comprehensive tree of life to replace the pitifully sketchy Tolweb tree of life?
This tree had languished for a decade when I last looked at it, after having been drastically reduced from the University of Phoenix Tree of Life which it somehow replaced.
Bornagain77, you wrote:
“We have known for a long time that common descent has failed hard.”
Common descent is fully compatible with ID, the theistic version being that God intervened many times in the evolution of life to guide it along the desired path. It’s much more satisfying intellectually than God “poofing” whole animals into existence ex nihilo, to replace others which have an awful lot in common with them.
That said, I should add that common descent does not mean a traditional tree structure. As one gets into the early steps in the evolution of life, there is so much lateral transfer that one has a web rather than a tree. Then individual trees of life for the three domains are like trees from a common underground root system that keeps penetrating itself like the mycelium of a mushroom. Further complicating the process is endosymbiosis, which joins two or more organisms into one, like the mitochondria that were originally bacteria fusing with a cell that was one of the archae.
[Query: how does one produce the vertical bars in the left hand margin to accompany quotes from a single post? Unlike on Usenet, I see no way to directly reply to posts like the one by Bornagain77.]
Pnyikos, in response to post 2, and in response to this quote from Dr. Cornelius Hunter, “We have known for a long time that common descent has failed hard”, replies that,
Well, I don’t care about what is ‘much more intellectually satisfying’. I care about what the empirical evidence itself actually says. Shoot, Darwinists are Darwinists precisely because it is personally ‘much more intellectually satisfying’ for them to believe in Darwinism, not because of what the empirical evidence actually says, but because they don’t want to be accountable to the God Who created them.
The full quote from Dr. Cornelius Hunter went as such, “We have known for a long time that common descent has failed hard. In Ewert’s new paper, we now have detailed, quantitative results demonstrating this. And Ewert provides a new model, with a far superior fit to the data.”
Thus it is the ‘quantitive results’ from the genetic evidence itself that is showing common descent to have ‘failed hard’.
Pnyikos did not find these quantitive results ”intellectually satisfying’ and thus appealed to lateral gene transfer to try to get around Ewert’s findings. Yet, first off, lateral, and/or horizontal, gene transfer does not get him out of his jam with what the empirical evidence is actually saying,
Secondly, in his paper showing common descent to have ‘failed hard’, “Ewert specifically chose Metazoan species because “horizontal gene transfer is held to be rare amongst this clade.”
Pnyikos also appealed to “endosymbiosis, which joins two or more organisms into one, like the mitochondria that were originally bacteria fusing with a cell that was one of the archae”, in order to try to counter Ewert’s findings showing common descent to have ‘failed hard’.
Yet “endosymbiosis”, as far as empirical science itself is concerned, is not nearly as ‘intellectually satisfying’ as Pnyikos would have hoped it to be, and certainly does not get him out of his jam with what the empirical evidence is actually saying.
Moreover, although Pnyikos finds God “poofing” whole animals into existence ex nihilo” to be intellectually dissatisfying, the fossil record itself could care less what Pnyikos finds to be ‘intellectually satisfying’ or not. Simply put, from the Cambrian explosion onward, the fossil record is severely discordant with Darwinian expectations of common descent.
Verse: