This is powerful stuff. Not only because it is so evocative of this “greatest show on Earth”, but also because there is a great deal of apparent truth in it. Trees not only reflect the hierarchies of traits naturalists used to classify the diversity of life.
Maderspacher ponders the power of that vision. Though earlier biologists had noted the nested hierarchies in life, it was Charles Darwin who organized the leaves into a tree, he explains.
The life at treeview skin#
And also what we don’t see - the microbes on our skin and in our guts, the bacteria that can kill us and the fungi that provide antibiotics - it’s all in the family. The mighty eagle and the ugly slug, the sequoia, the grass and the green slime on the beach - all are our relatives. Whatever we see moving and growing around us is a member of our extended family. Waltzing through the grass, he ponders the distant relatives under his feet. Well, let’s see here: the senior reviews editor, Florian Maderspacher, is certainly enraptured with “The Tree View of Life” and pays no attention to doubt.
Darwin’s Doubt? What doubt would that be? By habit, evolutionists strike a pose of confidence about their theory but perceptive readers may find hints of worry in a journal’s one-sided presentation of the Cambrian explosion. It’s a special issue of Current Biology devoted to the “History of Life on Earth.”