You all know I’m always pondering how progressive thinking sneaks into how we talk about evolution. And how if we could break some of these habits, we might begin to dismantle the ladder-of-life, which is so deeply engrained. Here is a common thing I see in lots of science communication that I think is one of these (relatively) easy to break habits – lining up some organisms when you talk about…
In part 2 of this series, I want to talk about how we can draw trees that promote tree thinking instead of undermining it. But first let’s consider whether we can or should worm our way out of this possibly time-consuming task. You might say, well, I just draw the trees – it’s the viewer’s job to interpret them correctly.* However, it is well established that the many members of any audience…
A few years ago I was at a talk that opened with an evolutionary context for the study and had a tree that looked about like this: I thought ruh-roh , I feel some basal-ancient-ladderness coming on. And sure enough it was primitive [living] taxa from there on out. This got me thinking about the relationship between tree drawing and tree thinking. This relationship is well established in the…
[Note, this post is not about phylogenies] I’ve sensed some ‘what’s-the-big-deal’-ness in response to recent discussion about inappropriate behavior at the recent Evolution meetings, so I want to explain why I take this so seriously. I think you should care too, assuming you are interested in making science more diverse and inclusive. I’ll speak from my own experience here, making this a perhaps…
One of the most pervasive carryovers from ladder-of-life thinking is that some living species are older than others. These are often thought of as sitting on the lower rungs of the ladder. Of course, tree-thinking rejects this notion as all living species have evolved the same amount of time from their shared common ancestor at the base. Nonetheless I hear so many phrases that reflect the…
A friend texted me today to share a ‘crazy’ biology fact – that ‘a slug is not a critter but a fungus’. Of course, I had to protest immediately. A slug is not a fungus, it is a mollusk! (Which I guess would colloquially be a critter?) This interchange made me think about how that kind of statement translates for an evolutionary biologist. When we say, a [species] is a [taxonomic group], we are…
0 0 1 108 616 University of Nebraska-Lincoln 5 1 723 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE In previous articles ( here and here *), I have argued that understanding phylogenetic trees is a core part of understanding evolution, and thus biology as a whole. My last blogpost emphasized that using terms like basal and early-diverging to refer to taxa misrepresents what phylogenies…
>>Terms like 'basal', 'early-diverging', and 'first-branching' reflect persistent misconceptions about evolution and phylogenies Why take the time to blog about the issues with the use of the word "basal" and similar terms? This a good question because, indeed, many tree-thinking papers have directly discussed misconceptions related to interpreting phylogenies (e.g., Omland et al. and Meir et al.…