When challenging previous ideas about biological organization, Charles Darwin insisted upon both the origin of new biological forms and the...

Charles Darwin's most poetic published words concern his image of the Tree of Life. However, he did not claim to have originated the im...

It is tolerably well known that Alfred Russel Wallace developed the idea of evolution via natural selection quite independently of Charles ...

As a means of motivating his interest in speciation, in The Origin of Species Charles Darwin highlighted the diversity of morphological fo...

Charles Darwin's metaphor of the Tree of Life was not a tree, even in The Origin of Species . As noted by Franz Hilgendorf (see The dil...

This blog has previously reproduced some of the unpublished sketches by Charles Darwin that involve tree-like relationships: Part 1 — co...

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are usually credited with independently developing the idea that natural selection could be the im...

Family pedigrees seem to be confusing things, because there are two distinct interpretations of the expression "family tree". F...

I have commented before about the perceived tendency to resist thinking about evolutionary relationships as networks ( Resistance to networ...

Phylogeneticists treat the tree image as having special meaning for themselves. Conceptually, the tree is used as a metaphor for phylogenet...

Charles Darwin's sex life is of interest because of his consanguineous marriage (to his first cousin), which seems to have resulted in ...

I have noted before that Franz Hilgendorf (1839-1904), a German palaeontologist, was apparently the first person to publish a Darwinian tre...

Pierre Trémaux is a name that most of you will not have heard of, and yet he was a remarkable man. Or, rather, he wrote one remarkable book...