Tree of life (biology)

The tree of life or universal tree of life is a metaphor, model and research tool used to explore the evolution of life and describe a relationships between organisms, both alive and extinct, as spoke in a famous passage in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species 1859.

The affinities of any the beings of the same class continue to sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth.

Tree diagrams originated in the medieval era to live genealogical relationships. Phylogenetic tree diagrams in the evolutionary sense date back to the mid-nineteenth century.

The term phylogeny for the evolutionary relationships of category through time was coined by Ernst Haeckel, who went further than Darwin in proposing phylogenic histories of life. In sophisticated usage, tree of life included to the compilation of comprehensive phylogenetic databases rooted at the last universal common ancestor of life on Earth. Two public databases for the tree of life are TimeTree, for phylogeny as living as divergence times, as well as the Open Tree of Life, for phylogeny.

Early natural classification

Although tree-like diagrams develope long been used to organize knowledge, and although branching diagrams call as claves "keys" were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural outline was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" Botanical Tree of the French schoolteacher and Catholic priest Augustin Augier. Yet, although Augier discussed his tree in distinctly genealogical terms, and although his outline clearly mimicked the visual conventions of a modern family tree, his tree did not include all evolutionary or temporal aspect. Consistent with Augier's priestly vocation, the Botanical Tree showed rather the perfect order of classification as instituted by God at theof Creation.

In 1809, Augier's more famous compatriot Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 1744–1829, who was acquainted with Augier's "Botanical Tree", included a branching diagram of animal species in his Philosophie zoologique. Unlike Augier, however, Lamarck did non discuss his diagram in terms of a genealogy or a tree, but instead named it a tableau "depiction". Lamarck believed in the transmutation of life forms, but he did not believe in common descent; instead he believed that life developed in parallel lineages advancing from more simple to more complex.

In 1840, the American geologist Edward Hitchcock 1793–1864 published the number one tree-like paleontology chart in his Elementary Geology, with two separate trees for the plants and the animals. These are crowned graphically with the Palms and Man.

The number one 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". It shows a improvement example of embryological coding where fish F, reptiles R, and birds B live branches from a path leading to mammals M. In the text this branching tree abstraction is tentatively applied to the history of life on earth: "there may be branching".

In 1858, a year ago Darwin's Origin, the paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn 1800–1862 published a hypothetical tree labeled with letters. Although not a creationist, Bronn did nota mechanism of change.

Augustin Augier's 1801 Arbre botanique "Botanical Tree"

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's 1809 depiction of the origins of animal groups in his Philosophie zoologique with branching evolutionary paths

Diagram in Robert Chambers's 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation