From Darwin’s Tree to the Tree of Life
A closer look at evolutionary trees and what we can learn looking deep into our past
Google knows about my trees…
The other morning in my Google News feed I got a Nature “News and Views” article about evolutionary trees and rates of speciation and extinction.
I’m curious whether that is a coincidence since I click on sciencey or science-ish or even outlandish science fiction news (if you put “Lock Ness” in a title I will click on it) — or whether this is a specific instance showing how much Google knows about what I’m doing on my computer — because I’ve recently been playing with evolutionary (or phylogenetic) trees of my own — check out one I made here on the left.
Google knows about my trees. And evolutionary trees are super important in biology, so I’d like to share a little bit about them with you, and the amazing things we can discover with them.
Darwin first sketched out conceptually what an evolutionary tree might look like in one of his notebooks. Check out this classic image just below. I love in particular the words he…
