The Press Reads: Trees of Life

Our occasional Friday series on the blog, The Press Reads, features short excerpts from recent JHUP books. We hope to whet your appetite and inspire additions to your reading list.  Today’s selection is drawn from the preface of Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution by Theodore W. Pietsch. Trees of Life, embraced by reviewers across many disciplines, is now available in trade paperback.

 

Ernst Haeckel’s family tree of the mammals, from 1866.

This is a book about  trees—not the transpiring, photosynthesizing kind, but tree-like branching diagrams that attempt to show the interrelationships of organisms, from viruses and bacteria to birds and mammals, both living and fossil. It is not intended as a treatise about the philosophy or science behind tree construction, nor is it a defense or refutation of the various relationships depicted among organisms. It is rather a celebration of the manifest beauty, intrinsic interest, and human ingenuity revealed in trees of life through time.

A phylogeny of elephants constructed by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1926, this one a “pictogram,” showing relationships, but also an indication of relative size, and the remarkable convergence of general body shape among modern forms descended from markedly different ancestors.

The emphasis is on the images, arranged chronologically, two hundred and thirty chosen from among thousands of possibilities, dating from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day. The descriptive text is kept to a  minimum—just enough to provide context.

The frontispiece of William King Gregory’s two-volume Evolution Emerging.

The focus of this book is on diagrams that resemble trees in the botanical sense, images with parts analogous to trunks, limbs, and terminal twigs, but other configurations are also explored as precursors and variations on the theme of biosystematic iconography. These various related images include bracketed  tables—trees laid on their  side—similar to modern-day analytical keys; maps, or so-called archipelagos, that hypothesize relationships analogous to the juxtaposition of geographical territories; webs or networks, in which individual taxa or chains of taxa are interconnected by lines of affinity or resemblance; and various numerical, symmetrical and geometric systems.

Dinosaur tree by Paul Callistus Sereno, emphasizing the sharp dichotomy between the two orders, the Ornithischia on the left and the Saurischia on the right.

While their choice of imagery varied considerably, most all eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century naturalists were working toward the same goal: to construct classifications of plants and animals that were “natural.” Their thought was that organisms brought together in “natural classifications” ought to share “natural affinities.” But just exactly what was meant by “natural affinity,” remained an unresolved question. It was Darwin’s theory of evolutionary change by means of natural selection that provided the missing context and unified the work of biosystematists in their pursuit of a natural system of classification. The phylogenetic tree as we know it today was one conspicuous result.

A universal tree of life based on ribosomal RNA sequences, sampled from about 3,000 species from throughout biodiversity, and constructed by David Mark Hillis and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Brain Pickings posted a review of Trees of Life, which you can read here.

“A luminous book . . . For classroom use, the brevity and simplicity of the introductory remarks will serve instructors who wish to teach these images’ and their authors’ significance to the history of biology and the history of scientific illustration. Biologists, historians of science, scholars interested in the intersections between art and design and science will find an abundance of images and wise commentary that reveals new details with each reading.”

— Christine Manganaro, Journal of the History of Biology

“With the concept of evolution now often iconified to the point of misrepresentation, Trees of Life reminds us that both the idea and its representation were—and are—fluid, debated, and reconstructed.”

—Camillia Matuk, Science

“Trees of Life commemorates the tree as a visual representation of life; science buffs will revel in this dazzling forest of transformation.”

—Jen Forbus, Shelf Awareness

Theodore W. Pietsch is Dorothy T. Gilbert Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and Curator of Fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Curious Death of Peter Artedi: A Mystery in the History of Science and Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea.

A family album of evolutionary trees

Guest post by Theodore W. Pietsch

When most people think of trees, they envision the leafy-green, growing, photosynthesizing kind, but there’s a vast forest out there made up of an entirely different kind of tree—branching diagrams and related iconography that attempt to reveal the relationships of plants and animals. For at least the past 500 years, naturalists, realizing that words are not nearly enough, have sought to demonstrate similarities and differences (or to reveal the imagined temporal order in which God created life on Earth) among organisms pictorially, that is, through a fascinating array of diagrams of various sorts. Most of the diagrams resemble trees in the botanical sense—images with parts analogous to trunks, limbs, and terminal twigs.

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I first became interested in these “trees of life” as a young graduate student some 45 years ago and, for no other reason than I thought they were beautiful, I’ve been collecting them ever since—making photocopies and filing them away, with no thought of what I might do with them later on. Then in 2009, when the world was celebrating Charles Darwin’s birthday (1809) and the publication of his On the Origin of Species (1859), I again began to think more about “trees” and it dawned on me that a book about them might be worth pursuing. I dug out my old files and soon realized that my collection hardly did the subject justice.

I then began a determined search for more and found, not just more of the same, but a surprising, almost infinite variety of design. And the rest is history: Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution was published in April 2012 by the JHU Press. I invite you to take a look and see for yourself these images that attest to the manifest beauty, intrinsic interest, and human ingenuity revealed in trees of life through time.

Theodore W. Pietsch is Dorothy T. Gilbert Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and Curator of Fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is author of more than a dozen books, including The Curious Death of Peter Artedi: A Mystery in the History of Science and Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea.

Happy birthday, Edison, Lincoln, and Darwin!

This weekend, we’re celebrating the birthdays of three great figures in history: Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, and Abraham Lincoln. Edison was born 165 years ago this Saturday, and Sunday marks the 203rd anniversary of the births of both Lincoln and Darwin.

Did you know that Edison wasn’t the first to develop an incandescent light bulb? His invention, though, was the most successful of all the competing inventions. Drawing from the documents in the Edison archives, Robert Friedel and Paul Israel explain how this came to be in Edison’s Electric Light: The Art of Invention. (Nearly a hundred years ago, Edison predicted that another of his inventions, the motion picture camera, would render books in schools obsolete within 10 years; while that hasn’t happened yet, you can read Edison’s Electric Light via Project MUSE.)

And for more on the Wizard of Menlo Park that might spark some of that 1 percent of your own genius that’s inspiration, check out The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, Vol. 5, Vol. 6, and Vol. 7.

For an ambitious way to observe the Great Emancipator’s birthday, you could set out to achieve “Ultimate Lincoln Knowledge” by reading Michael Burlingame’s
masterpiece, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, which Christopher Hitchens called  “magnificent” and William Safire “magisterial.” If you read this 2,000-page biography from cover to cover (and then cover to cover again, as there are two volumes) by the next 12th of February, I will get my hands on a stovepipe hat just so I can tip it to you.

If you prefer your biographies to be more succinct, try Tim M. Berra’s Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man. As the Library Journal says, readers “who want a quick, no-frills but still authoritative read on Darwin’s life couldn’t find a better source.” For some historical insight into the current debates on evolution and religious belief, check out Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877–1902, by Mariano Artigas, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martínez. Another book by Glick on the father of evolution is What about Darwin? All Species of Opinion from Scientists, Sages, Friends, and Enemies Who Met, Read, and Discussed the Naturalist Who Changed the World, which Michael Ruse of the Quarterly Review of Biology called “a splendid compilation of opinions of the great (and not so great) who read Darwin’s works.” Ruse goes on to say, “Like Tennyson, get two copies; one for yourself and one to put on the side table in the guest bedroom.”

And you can do this for any of the books we’ve mentioned with a 40 percent discount when you purchase them through our website and enter the code HELD at checkout. Happy Edison-Lincoln-Darwin birthday weekend!