Did anyone, even Charlie D himself, think it was more than one possible metaphor for the process?

Jan 22, 2009 20:52


How is this news? Charles Darwin's "tree of life", which shows how species are related through evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists.
The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of an imaginary tree in 1837, an idea that quickly came to symbolise the theory of ( Read more... )

evolution, metaphor, darwin, science, journalism

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tournevis January 22 2009, 21:11:15 UTC
It was taught in grade school! that it was a symbolic representation and not a scientific representation!

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trees are old auroramama January 22 2009, 23:57:44 UTC
First of all, the "tree of life" is much older than Darwin. You don't have to believe in natural selection to notice that sheep and goats are more similar than sheep and eels. The main problem with "tree" is the assumption that there's an up and down axis, and humans are the up. Also much older than Darwin. So one great wave of "it's not a tree" thinking leads to "it's a big bushy ball of seaweed," where the tips are what's still around today, but no particular branch is up ( ... )

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fox_in_sand January 23 2009, 12:51:32 UTC
This is at least 30 years old news! Grrr..

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aquaeri January 26 2009, 03:40:31 UTC
This is an unfortunate attempt to write a popular-access article about an issue within evolutionary science itself, which the participants in that debate understand in a completely different way, and the journalist picked some bad examples to try to make that discussion accessible outside evolutionary biology. (Suggesting, oddly enough, that zie does not have much understanding of the within-the-field issue under debate.)

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