Mapping Relationships II

Representing the complex relationships between generations of a single family is one thing; try representing the evolutionary links between all known life forms.

For centuries now, naturalists, zoologists, botanists, evolutionary biologists, and taxonomists have attempted to develop graphic devices to help them explain and illustrate relationships spanning billions of years and billions of species. More often than not, this has produced absolutely hilarious results and told us much more about the assumptions of the mind behind that particular evolutionary tree rather than the world it was attempting to represent.

Every once in a while though, an evolutionary tree comes along that truly makes us see the world in a new light by showing us – as one science writer recently put it – how close the homo sapiens' branch on the tree of life is to that of a portobello mushroom.