Discovering the Tree of Life

National Science Foundation Office of Legislative and Public Affairs ^ | November 18, 2002 | NSF Press Release

[forsnax5]

NSF awards grants to discover the relationships of 1.75 million species

One of the most profound ideas to emerge in modern science is Charles Darwin's concept that all of life, from the smallest microorganism to the largest vertebrate, is connected through genetic relatedness in a vast genealogy. This "Tree of Life" summarizes all we know about biological diversity and underpins much of modern biology, yet many of its branches remain poorly known and unresolved.

To help scientists discover what Darwin described as the tree's "everbranching and beautiful ramifications," the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $17 million in "Assembling the Tree of Life" grants to researchers at more than 25 institutions. Their studies range from investigations of entire pieces of DNA to assemble the bacterial branches; to the study of the origins of land plants from algae; to understanding the most diverse group of terrestrial predators, the spiders; to the diversity of fungi and parasitic roundworms; to the relationships of birds and dinosaurs.

"Despite the enormity of the task," said Quentin Wheeler, director of NSF's division of environmental biology, which funded the awards, "now is the time to reconstruct the tree of life. The conceptual, computational and technological tools are available to rapidly resolve most, if not all, major branches of the tree of life. At the same time, progress in many research areas from genomics to evolution and development is currently encumbered by the lack of a rigorous historical framework to guide research."

Scientists estimate that the 1.75 million known species are only 10 percent of the total species on earth, and that many of those species will disappear in the decades ahead. Learning about these species and their evolutionary history is epic in its scope, spanning all the life forms of an entire planet over its several billion year history, said Wheeler.

Why is assembling the tree of life so important? The tree is a picture of historical relationships that explains all similarities and differences among plants, animals and microorganisms. Because it explains biological diversity, the Tree of Life has proven useful in many fields, such as choosing experimental systems for biological research, determining which genes are common to many kinds of organisms and which are unique, tracking the origin and spread of emerging diseases and their vectors, bio-prospecting for pharmaceutical and agrochemical products, developing data bases for genetic information, and evaluating risk factors for species conservation and ecosystem restoration.

The Assembling the Tree of Life grants provide support for large multi-investigator, multi-institutional, international teams of scientists who can combine expertise and data sources, from paleontology to morphology, developmental biology, and molecular biology, says Wheeler. The awards will also involve developing software for improved visualization and analysis of extremely large data sets, and outreach and education programs in comparative phylogenetic biology and paleontology, emphasizing new training activities, informal science education, and Internet resources and dissemination.

-NSF-

For a list of the Assembling the Tree of Life grants, see: http://www.nsf.gov/bio/pubs/awards/atol_02.htm

[forsnax5]

Seventeen million bucks to create a giant document for the crevo's to argue about!

A little something for a quiet weekend's musings.

[forsnax5]

Tree Of Life ping!

[AndrewC]

Checking in

[MHGinTN]

Geez Louise, I thought another of my novel themes had been stolen. Glad to see it's only about Darwinian puzzlements.

[AndrewC]

The real argument is not going to be between those you suspect, rather it will be between the Darwininians and the molecular evidence. Anyway, last I heard it was not the tree of life. It was either the "bush of life" or the "cactus of life".

[f.Christian]

"The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the rise of the positive(ideological/illogical)* sciences, and with this an intensification in skepticism about God and the claims of traditional religion, especially among the educated classes. This inclination became most marked after the publication of The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin ascribed man's immediate ancestry to the anthropoids, supposedly through a process of gradual evolution. Man was no longer a creature made in the image of God, but merely a natural extension of certain lower forms of life, a refined gorilla, as it were. It was these circumstances, and this intellectual milieu, that led philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to declare that "God is dead" and to predict the rise of new and terrible manifestations of barbarism in the century that was to come. As he put it, "For ... we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of ... there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth." The non-believer Nietzsche would agree wholly with the Christian believer Dostoyevsky about one thing: Without faith in God, all horrors, all of man's worst nightmares, would become possible. And so they did."

"What men... believe---really does matter."

*...my addition!

[Alamo-Girl]

LOL! If we are guessing what a "tree" drawn from genetic evidence might look like, my guess is a lawn.

[RnMomof7]

Nietzsche spent his final years in a lunatic asylum...the man that pronounced God dead signed his insane musings "the crucified one"

[Hebrews 11:6]

If we are guessing what a "tree" drawn from genetic evidence might look like, my guess is a lawn.

From Dr. Fuz Rana: "...the hominid fossil record is not a family "tree" but a "lawn."

("Toumai Man Offers Evolutionists No Hope," Connections, 3rd & 4th Quarter 2002, Quarterly Newsletter of Reasons to Believe.)

[LiteKeeper]

mega-dittoes

[Hebrews 11:6]

The real "Tree of Life" is the one on which Jesus loved us.

[Alamo-Girl]

LOL! I had no idea it was already used! Thank you!!!

[edsheppa]

What does that mean exactly?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you! Hugs!!!

[RnMomof7]

And the real tree of life is in heaven...not here

[Alamo-Girl]

The reason I said "lawn" is that I expect the genetic code to match around 50% of the time (or more.) Each unique creature would have differences that would look like neat, little spikes --- like blades of grass.

[Doctor Stochastic]

So far, things look more like a tree than like a lawn. The genotypic trees look much like the phenotypic trees.

"Tree of Life" is also a representation of the Kabala. It is used in Tarot reading.

[LiteKeeper]

YEC - you are welcome

[gore3000]

Seventeen million bucks to create a giant document for the crevo's to argue about!

Crayola stock took a big bump!

[gore3000]

So far, things look more like a tree than like a lawn. The genotypic trees look much like the phenotypic trees.

No it does not. Evolutionists claimed that mitochondrial DNA would verify the classifications that had been made by phenotype. However, this has proved false. It has given some very different results and now evolutionists have thrown out mtDNA as proving their theory:

1. Ying Cao, Axel Janke, Peter J. Waddell, Michael Westerman, Osamu Takenaka, Shigenori Murata, Norihiro Okada, Svante Pääbo, and Masami Hasegawa, “Conflict Among Individual Mitochondrial Proteins in Resolving the Phylogeny of Eutherian Orders,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 47 (1998): 307-322.
It is widely believed that molecular data confirm morphological data when the history of groups such as the mammals is being reconstructed. Many cases exist, however, where molecules (such as proteins) give “false” or erroneous phylogenies. This paper, by a team of researchers from Japan, Germany, and Australia, demonstrates that different mitochondrial proteins can give different, and contradictory, groupings. In particular, the protein NADH dehydrogenase (ND1) places primates and rodents together as closest relatives, with ferungulates (artiodactyls + cetaceans + perisodactyls + carnivores) as more distantly related to primates -- in contradiction to most other data, which places primates and ferungulates together as closest relatives. The authors conclude that this anomalous phylogenetic grouping “is not due to a stochastic error, but is due to convergent or parallel evolution” (p. 321), suggesting that molecular evidence is not free from the confounding (historically misleading) effects known to plague other types of systematic data, such as anatomical patterns.
From: Bibliography presented to Ohio BD of Ed .