Abstract
The ‘Tree of Life’ is intended to represent the pattern of evolutionary processes that result in bifurcating species lineages. Often justified in reference to Darwin’s discussions of trees, the Tree of Life has run up against numerous challenges especially in regard to prokaryote evolution. This special issue examines scientific, historical and philosophical aspects of debates about the Tree of Life, with the aim of turning these criticisms towards a reconstruction of prokaryote phylogeny and even some aspects of the standard evolutionary understanding of eukaryotes. These discussions have arisen out of a multidisciplinary collaboration of people with an interest in the Tree of Life, and we suggest that this sort of focused engagement enables a practical understanding of the relationships between biology, philosophy and history.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This remarkable piece of scholarship traces the history of trees and networks from the eighteenth century to the present day, and provides the original illustrations of the most important of those representations.
References
Andam CP, Williams D, Gogarten JP (2010) Natural taxonomy in light of horizontal gene transfer. Biol Philos. doi:10.1007/s10539-010-9212-8
Archibald JD (2009) Edward Hitchcock’s pre-Darwin (1840) ‘Tree of life’. J Hist Biol 42:561–592
Bapteste E, O’Malley MA, Beiko RG, Ereshefsky M, Gogarten JP, Franklin-Hall L, Lapointe FJ, Dupré J, Dagan T, Boucher Y, Martin W (2009) Prokaryotic evolution and the tree of life are two different things. Biol Direct 4:34
Barsanti G (1992) La scala, la mappa, l’albero: Immagini e classificazioni della natura fra Sei e Ottocento. Sansoni, Firenze
Brink-Roby H (2009) Natural representation: diagram and text in Darwin’s on the origin of species. Vic Stud 51:247–273
Darwin CR (1837–1838) Notebook B: [Transmutation of species]. Darwin online http://darwin-online.org.uk
Darwin C (1859) On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, 1st edn. John Murray, London
Doolittle WF (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science 284:2124–2128
Doolittle WF (2000) Uprooting the tree of life. Sci Am 282:90–95
Doolittle WF (2009) The practice of classification and the theory of evolution, and what the demise of Charles Darwin’s tree of life hypothesis means for both of them. Phil Trans R Soc B 364:2221–2228
Doolittle WF, Zhaxybayeva O (2009) The origins of prokaryotic species. Genome Res 19:744–756
Haeckel EHPA (1866) Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. Verlag von Georg Reimer, Berlin
Hodge MJS (1983) Darwin and the laws of the animate part of the terrestrial system (1835–1837): on the Lyellian origins of his zoonomical explanatory program. Stud Hist Biol 9:1–106
Hodge MJS (1985) Darwin as a lifelong generation theorist. In: Kohn D (ed) The Darwinian heritage. Princeton University Press/Nova Pacifica, Princeton, pp 207–243
Kleiner SA (1981) Problem solving and discovery in the growth of Darwin’s theories of evolution. Synthese 47:119–162
Kohn D (1980) Theories to work by: rejected theories, reproduction, and Darwin’s path to natural selection. Stud Hist Biol iv:67–170
Maclaurin J, Sterelny K (2008) What is biodiversity?. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Martin W (1999) Mosaic bacterial chromosomes: a challenge on route to a tree of genomes. BioEssays 21:99–104
Moreira D, López-García P (2009) Ten reasons to exclude viruses from the tree of life. Nat Rev Microbiol 7:306–311. [See the nine responses to this paper and the authors’ response to them in the following issue of NRM.]
O’Malley MA (forthcoming, 2010). Construction and deconstruction: The influence of lateral gene transfer on the evolution of the Tree of Life. In: Oren A, Papke T (eds) Molecular phylogeny of microorganisms. Horizon, Norwich
Oldroyd DR (1984) How did Darwin arrive at his theory? The secondary literature to 1982. Hist Sci xxii:325–374
Ragan M (2009) Trees and networks before and after Darwin. Biol Direct 4(1):43
Sloan PR (1986) Darwin, vital matter, and the transformism of species. J Hist Biol 19:369–445
Whittaker RH (1969) New concepts of kingdoms of organisms. Science 163:150–160
Acknowledgments
The network and series of meetings on which this special issue was based are funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which generously underwrote a whole programme of research and events called ‘Questioning the Tree of Life’, http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/egenis/research/QuestioningtheTreeofLife.htm. This programme is based within Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society at the University of Exeter. We are grateful to several members of the network for comments on drafts of this introduction, and to Sabina Leonelli and Staffan Müller-Wille for additional discussion. The special issue is especially indebted to its referees, many of whom wrote detailed and constructive reports in very short timeframes. We list most of them, with gratitude, below.
Rob Beiko, Yan Boucher, John Dupré, Betsey Dyer, Marc Ereshefsky, Arantza Exteberria, Laura Franklin-Hall, Lisa Gannett, Peter Gogarten, Todd Grantham, Matt Haber, James MacLaurin, Christophe Malaterre, James Mallet, James McInerney, Gordon McOuat, Greg Morgan, Staffan Müller-Wille, Maureen O’Malley, Thomas Reydon, Olivier Rieppel, Susan Spath, Joel Velasco, Rob Wilson, and Olga Zhaxybayeva.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
O’Malley, M.A., Martin, W. & Dupré, J. The tree of life: introduction to an evolutionary debate. Biol Philos 25, 441–453 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9208-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9208-4