Category: Tree of life

Scholar: Darwin did not invent the Tree of Life. He never called his diagram that

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… more

He doubted Darwin’s tree of life, but he was just a creationist. Then …

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… more