Evolution is not a tree of life but a fuzzy network

Evolutionary biology is sincerely beautiful, the biological history of our species is a meta-history to human history.<p>On a grander scale, the biological history of life itself weaves the career of the human race into a context of profound interconnectivity.<p>It&#x27;s natural to contemplate your origins, the place and culture you come from, your ancestors and the history of your family. It&#x27;s even more profound to contemplate your biological origins, your ancestry into species unrecognizable from your own.<p>It really is a humbling experience to trace a path thousands and even millions of years into the past. The end result is an increased appreciation for the beauty of nature and for the inseparable unity of the human race.

5% - 8% of human genome appears to be from [retro]virus inserts. Thats outside the tree of descent.

I&#x27;ve always said it&#x27;s not the <i>Tree of Life</i>, but rather the <i>DAG of Life</i>.

Darwin believed that each successive generation of a species had increasing mutations leading to a gradual divergence. Another school of thought believes that a species remains at equilibrium until some environmental stressor activates a rapid divergence. If this &quot;punctuated equilibrium&quot; is true, climate change will give rise to many new species, as would all mass extinctions.

Seeing that the article was about the &quot;Tree of Life&quot; metaphor and Coral, it is surprising that it didn&#x27;t mention that Darwin actually suggested that a &quot;Coral of Life&quot; metaphor was superior to a &quot;Tree of Life&quot; metaphor in his notebooks (or maybe I missed it?).<p>I&#x27;m not a biologist, but I found this paper (Podani, 2019) about the &quot;Coral of Life&quot; metaphor interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s11692-019-09474-w.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s11692-019-094...</a>

It&#x27;s certainly a tree of individuals, though with single-celled division even that is not clear.<p>Things get tricky when you talk about species, because species are (arbitrary?) equivalency classes of individuals.

I find that a lot of things are really DAGs or full on graphs but are easier to reason about as roughly trees. Website structures, for example. All knowledge, even. For some reason, trees are so much easier to hold in the head.