Explore evolution in your own home, with our gorgeous wall poster. Showing all the branches of evolution, and lavishly illustrated, you can have your copy delivered to your door - for free, from The Open University. This poster supports all the programmes in the Darwin season - Tree Of Life, Dangerous Idea and In Darwin’s Garden.

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Darwin’s Tree is no more

The idea of a universal ‘tree’ of life has come into question, please read;

New Scientist - Editorial: Uprooting Darwin’s tree

If anyone now thinks that biology is sorted, they are going to be proved wrong too. The more that genomics, bioinformatics and many other newer disciplines reveal about life, the more obvious it becomes that our present understanding is not up to the job. We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism.

Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life

For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. “For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life,” says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,” says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.