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The tree of life or universal tree of life is a metaphor, conceptual model, and research tool used to explore the evolution of life and describe the relationships between organisms, both living and extinct, as described in a famous passage in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). [1]
The idea of a tree of life arose from ancient notions of a ladder-like progression from lower into higher forms of life (such as in the Great Chain of Being).Early representations of "branching" phylogenetic trees include a "paleontological chart" showing the geological relationships among plants and animals in the book Elementary Geology, by Edward Hitchcock (first edition: 1840).
A tree of life, like this one from Charles Darwin's notebooks c. July 1837, implies a single common ancestor at its root (labelled "1"). A phylogenetic tree directly portrays the idea of evolution by descent from a single ancestor. [3] An early tree of life was sketched by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his Philosophie zoologique in 1809.
A phylogenetic diagram can be rooted or unrooted. A rooted tree diagram indicates the hypothetical common ancestor of the tree. An unrooted tree diagram (a network) makes no assumption about the ancestral line, and does not show the origin or "root" of the taxa in question or the direction of inferred evolutionary transformations. [5]
A dendrogram of the Tree of Life. This phylogenetic tree is adapted from Woese et al. rRNA analysis. [3] The vertical line at bottom represents the last universal common ancestor (LUCA). Heatmap of RNA-Seq data showing two dendrograms in the left and top margins. A dendrogram is a diagram representing a tree. This diagrammatic representation is ...
Evolutionary tree showing the divergence of modern species from the last universal ancestor in the center. [5] The three domains are colored, with bacteria blue, archaea green, and eukaryotes red. The project of a complete description of the phylogenetic relationships among all biological species is dubbed the "tree of life".
A rooted tree of life into three ancient monophyletic lineages: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes based on rRNA genes Lineages are typically visualized as subsets of a phylogenetic tree . A lineage is a single line of descent or linear chain within the tree, while a clade is a (usually branched) monophyletic group, containing a single ancestor ...
In the Book of Proverbs, the tree of life is associated with wisdom: "[Wisdom] is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her, and happy [is every one] that retaineth her." [35] In Proverbs 15:4, the tree of life is associated with calmness: "A soothing tongue is a tree of life; but perverseness therein is a wound to the spirit." [36] [37]