What if the pattern of evolution is not actually a tree?
-19. By mapping a major branch on the tree of life, B10K aims to light the way.
In the eighteenth century, natural-history museums started using anatomical similarities to classify plants and animals into increasingly specific categories: class, order, family, genus, species. Darwin realized that species share traits because their ancestors were one and the same. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals all have spines, but not because God had given them to each creature separately; rather, the spine suggested a “common parent” living long ago.
Early sequencing was expensive and tedious, but, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, a signal was emerging from the noise. The journalpublished an article about the promise of a single unified tree of life. But its author also identified a complication: each genome contains many different genes, and each one could generate a different evolutionary tree.
The tree is so ingrained in evolutionary biology that scientists encourage “tree thinking.” By learning to think in terms of trees, students can avoid the common fallacy of reading evolution as a ladder in which simpler organisms become more complex, as in the famous image “The Ascent of Man,” which shows a knuckle-walking ape evolving into an upright human. For all its pedagogical value, however, the tree also embeds subtle assumptions about evolution.
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