For the love of trees

You all know I’m always pondering how progressive thinking sneaks into how we talk about evolution.  And how if we could break some of these...

In part 2 of this series, I want to talk about how we can draw trees that promote tree thinking instead of undermining it. But first let’s c...

A few years ago I was at a talk that opened with an evolutionary context for the study and had a tree that looked about like this: I th...

[Note, this post is not about phylogenies] I’ve sensed some ‘what’s-the-big-deal’-ness in response to recent discussion about inappropriat...

One of the most pervasive carryovers from ladder-of-life thinking is that some living species are older than others.  These are often though...

A friend texted me today to share a ‘crazy’ biology fact – that ‘a slug is not a critter but a fungus’.   Of course, I had to protest immedi...

In previous articles ( here and here *), I have argued that understanding phylogenetic trees is a core part of understanding ...