Drawing two million branches: My story in tomorrow’s NYTimes on building the full tree of life

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Even the most elaborate pictures of the tree of life you can find online are gaunt shadows of life’s full diversity. In tomorrow’s New York Times, I write about a team of scientists who are setting out to build a tree with every described species on Earth–and program it so that the entire scientific community can help tease out its branches and add more branches as they discover the six, sixty, or six hundred million more unnamed species on Earth. Check it out.

Originally published June 4, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

Tree of Life Project Aims for Every Twig and Leaf

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The New York Times, June 4, 2012

Link

In 1837, Charles Darwin opened a notebook and drew a simple tree with a few branches. Each branch, which he labeled with a letter, represented a species. In that doodle, he captured his newfound realization that species were related, having evolved from a common ancestor. Across the top of the page he wrote, “I think.”

Two decades later Darwin presented a detailed account of the tree of life in “On the Origin of Species.” And much of evolutionary biology since then has been dedicated to illuminating parts of the tree. Using DNA, fossils and other clues, scientists have been able to work out the relationships of many groups of organisms, making rough sketches of the entire tree of life.

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I Point To TED Talks and I Point to Kim Kardashian. That Is All.

Posted on by Carl Zimmer

This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.

The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. By Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. Published by TED Books.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

June 1, 2012

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The Common Hand

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National Geographic, May 31, 2012

Link

The hand is where the mind meets the world. We humans use our hands to build fires and sew quilts, to steer airplanes, to write, dig, remove tumors, pull a rabbit out of a hat. The human brain, with its open-ended creativity, may be the thing that makes our species unique. But without hands, all the grand ideas we concoct would come to nothing but a very long to-do list.

The reason we can use our hands for so many things is their extraordinary anatomy. Underneath the skin, hands are an exquisite integration of tissues.

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