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.

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 View all posts by Jonathan Eisen