Tree of life (biology)

I believe this simile largely speaks the truth.Tree diagrams originated in the medieval era to represent genealogical relationships.

The term phylogeny for the evolutionary relationships of species through time was coined by Ernst Haeckel, who went further than Darwin in proposing phylogenic histories of life.

Consistent with Augier's priestly vocation, the Botanical Tree showed rather the perfect order of nature as instituted by God at the moment of Creation.

[9] In 1840, the American geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864) published the first tree-like paleontology chart in his Elementary Geology, with two separate trees for the plants and the animals.

[10] The first edition of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844 in England, contained a tree-like diagram in the chapter "Hypothesis of the development of the vegetable and animal kingdoms".

[11] It shows a model of embryological development where fish (F), reptiles (R), and birds (B) represent branches from a path leading to mammals (M).

[12] In 1858, a year before Darwin's Origin, the paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800–1862) published a hypothetical tree labelled with letters.

In contrast, Ernst Haeckel illustrated a phylogenetic tree (branching only) in 1866, not scaled to time, and of real species and higher taxa.

As we here and there see a thin straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station.

Stephen Jay Gould, for one, has argued that Darwin placed the famous passage quoted above "at a crucial spot in his text", where it marked the conclusion of his argument for natural selection, illustrating both the interconnectedness by descent of organisms as well as their success and failure in the history of life.

[21] In 1990, Carl Woese, Otto Kandler and Mark Wheelis proposed a novel "tree of life" consisting of three lines of descent for which they introduced the term domain as the highest rank of classification.

[27] There does not yet appear to be a consensus; in a 2009 review article, Roger and Simpson conclude that "with the current pace of change in our understanding of the eukaryote tree of life, we should proceed with caution.

[35] The prokaryotes (the two domains of bacteria and archaea) and certain animals such as bdelloid rotifers[36] freely pass genetic information between unrelated organisms by horizontal gene transfer.