The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

6. The phylogenetic forest and the quest for the elusive Tree of Life in the age of genomics

A very brief history of the TOL

The concept of the Tree of Life (TOL) in its modern meaning was introduced by Darwin in his notebooks as early as 1838. Twenty years later, Darwin captured it in the single illustration of The Origin of Species. Certainly, he did not invent the idea of depicting genetic relationships in the form of a tree. For centuries, trees have been used to represent genealogies, such as actual histories of families (for example, royal ones). However, Darwin was the first to come up with the seminal idea that different species were related by a tree, with the leaves corresponding to extant species and the internal nodes corresponding ...