![]() The green and budding twigs may represent existing species and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. “ The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. But it was Darwin who really cemented the idea of the tree of life as a way of describing the evolutionary relationships between species and how one might evolve from another. His Arbre botanique, published in 1801 represents the relationships of plants in the shape of a literal as well as metaphorical tree, demonstrating the beauty and perfect order of divine creation, as Augier saw it.Ī few years later in 1809, his compatriot, the zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, drew the first family tree of animals. As he so modestly put it, "God created, Linnaeus organized."Īlthough Charles Darwin is often credited with drawing the first tree of life with his 1830s sketch, the honour should really go to French nobleman, schoolteacher and priest Augustin Augier. For example, whales and manatee were classified as fish in the first edition but later moved to the mammal section.īy the twelfth edition, published in 1770 just eight years before Linnaeus’ death, the Systema Naturea contained around 13,000 species – an impressive attempt at describing the logic of life. Some species were also reclassified as Linnaeus learned more about them. As he and his apostles gathered more and more specimens, the tables had to be expanded, redrawn and republished. He then used columns and rows to group similar organisms. Linnaeus’ Systema Naturea, published in 1753, consisted of three tables, one for animals, one for plants and one for minerals. But rather than a tree, the first attempt at cataloguing life was a table. ![]() ![]() Struggling with the information overload, he had to come up with a way of organising all these species in a way that made sense and captured the relationships between them. Thousands of specimens started flooding in from across the globe, causing Linnaeus to complain that he was working night and day ‘hatching new species’ like a hen hatching her eggs. Thanks to this army of apostles, word soon started to spread about their plant-loving professor and his interest in collection and classification. As it turns out, ‘martyrs’ might have been a better name for his unlucky crew, as seven of them died during their travels. He dubbed these botanical adventurers his ‘apostles’ – which fitted well with his apparently high opinion of himself as the self-styled ‘prince of botany’. ![]() Rather than taking to the ocean waves himself to indulge this passion - his furthest expedition was to Lapland and he never left Sweden after the age of 30 – Linnaeus sent his students to travel abroad and collect specimens to send back to him. ![]() He had a particular love for plants – the more exotic the better. So how did we get here? To find out, we need to take a trip back to the 18th century, to meet Carl Linnaeus – the father of taxonomy.īorn in 1707, Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician who was obsessed with collecting, identifying, naming, and classifying organisms into different species. Scientists have been drawing and re-drawing the tree of life for hundreds of years, based on observed similarities and differences between species.Īdvances in DNA sequencing now allow us to analyse genetic relationships between species, refining these trees with ever greater depth and accuracy, and adding in more and more branches and a trunk that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life on earth, some 4 billion-or-so years ago.īut rather than making things clearer, all this information has turned Darwin’s simple tree into a thorny, tangled thicket, and raises questions about what it even means to be a species. Perhaps the most famous example is from Charles Darwin himself, whose first sketched out a small spidery tree explaining the evolutionary relationships between species back in 1837, labelled with the immortal words “I think…” ![]()
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