New York Times Book Review Use of a "Tree of Life"

Funny use of a “Tree of Life” in the New York Times book review section from a few months ago (The New York Times:Natural Selections)

In this, they overlay onto a somewhat strange Tree of Life, the images used for various book publishers and what types of organisms they use. They say that this represents a fair amount of biodiversity, but really only because they draw the tree in a skewed manner. Basically, there are animals and plants in the logos and the way they draw the tree makes this look like it is a lot of biodiversity … but really it is a small component compared to the whole tree of life. I also like that they put robots on the insect branch and they have mythology as a VERY deep branch in the tree.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

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