The tree of life.
(Science Week - Day 1!)
It’s Darwin Day! Join Steve in celebrating science by posting something cool today or all week. (Here’s my original invitation.)
So, let’s get Darwinian.
He’d have been proud; the guy is legendary for looking around the world and hypothesizing all life on Earth is related and therefore could be diagrammed as a single family tree (or, as he allowed in the closing of his famous book, a few).
Imagine how mind-bogglingly complex the tree would be if it represented every single organism in the history of the planet! Gaah. And wow. It’s more than complicated enough just modelling species to the extent we’ve tried to sort them.
Obviously David Attenborough gets to summarize it.
BONUS: An interactive Flash thing where you can see a simple version of the tree and click at its branches (investigating questions like “what’s the most recent common ancestor of a cat and a turtle," et cetera).
BONUS 2: There are a few of these on the web, but here’s the other one I noticed this year – a cool fractal version with a lot more complexity: http://www.onezoom.org/