The Tree of Life

Why are we the only species with chins? Where did our spines come from? Why don't we have wings? The story of how the amazing diversity of life on earth came to exist is one of the greatest in biology. This book shows how telling this story depends on understanding the gigantic family tree - the Tree of Life - that records the relationships between all species of life on earth - from humans, fish and butterflies to oak trees, mushrooms and bacteria. Knowing the Tree of Life unlocks the distant past letting us travel back in time to follow the twists and turns of life's history; it is what allows us to tell the very personal story that began four billion years ago with the tiny ancestor of all life and ends with you and me. Studded with vivid and fascinating stories, this book is a biography of life itself. We'll learn how grey wolves are more closely related to humans than they are to Tasmanian wolves (or Thylacine) despite having near identical skeletons, because evolution baffles us by inventing the same structures in wildly diverging species. We'll see how geological change and environmental catastrophe left their marks on the genome, and follow individual scientists down winding evolutionary byways and dead ends in their attempt to solve this greatest of all puzzles. Along the way, we'll see how, far from being a static representation of the past, the tree of life is a living thing which constantly alters our perspective on the present. Understanding how the amazing diversity of life on earth came to be is one of the greatest puzzles in biology. From Darwin's early sketches to the vast computer diagrams scientists are building today, the tree of life explains the epic history of the various ways it's possible to be a living thing.