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Visualising the The Tree of Life

Whilst talking about the wonders of Human Achievement in the arts and in technology, we do well to consider that so much that has been achieved is of such vastness in concept it is hard to visualise. Biodiversity is a very big thing to take in, despite the fact that the word is bandied around in the media these days with such freedom. I have tried to engender an appreciation of what biodiversity loss actually means to the world, and to us in the blog  Jobs, with no one to fill them. That’s loss of biodiversity. But what is biodiversity? How diverse is biodiversity? How deep does it go, how far, how complex is the web that life encompasses?

It is only now, within the last ten or fifteen years that we are really starting to appreciate how all-encompassing the concept is, and although some of the older generation were deeply worried at the levels of pollution, destruction and blindness that was being practised across the globe - from our own streets and hedgerows, to forests and fields, plains and deserts across the globe - that was damaging the very life that we rely on to keep the nature that we evolved with running smoothly, nobody listened and nothing was fixed. So now, in the wake of the climate crisis, these concerns are, at last, being brought to the fore, even though they often detract from the focus and urgency of the climate crisis itself and the immediate main causes. The fact remains that these are issues that should have been sorted decades ago. But it is only now they are being considered seriously. We could say better late than never...

Consider the achievements of such figures as Darwin and Wallace, swimming against the tide of religious belief, stepping outside the accepted norms of scientific thinking, and embracing concepts that were so vast in extent. They must have been truly staggered when the realisation hit them of what later became the theories of evolution and natural selection, and the vastness of time that was represented, the vastness and breadth of the development of species. Not just those in existence today, but all of those that evolved, developed, specialised, flourished, receded and then died out along the way. The ones that only remain to us as fossils, often as dismembered pieces of the whole organisms, sometimes microscopic remains petrified inside rocks, or maybe even just traces of their passage over or through wet sediment.

Thankfully technology can help us grasp some of these concepts in their depth, breadth, extent, and age. Consider a journey, starting from the very base - or top - of the evolutionary tree, the tree that we have constructed to help us see the interrelationships between organisms. How one developed from another, or how one evolved alongside another; how some developed down a side branch that became more predominant than the main branch it came from. It was not a simple linear process, and there were and are lots of dead ends. But think of the journey from the basic start to the eventual emergence of a complex organism like.... a dandelion. Do you have any idea how that journey would proceed?

Well, go to this website and in the search box type 'dandelion' and select the top one that is shown Tree of Life (opens in a separate tab). Notice that every leaf you pass is a separate species alive today (the vastness of extinct organisms is only just beginning to get incorporated into this software). Branches are where development, evolution, caused a split down two different routes.

When you arrive at your destination, you are looking down into the vastness of the diversity of dandelions. Just dandelions. Not all flowers, not just daisy types. Just dandelions. The global spread of dandelions.

Now type into the search box 'Taraxacum borovezum', select the one listed, and watch. The rest of this journey is through the many dandelions that have diversified to fill the many environmental niches they have encountered, and adjusted to, evolved to cope with, across the globe. When you get to the end, breathlessly, scroll back, retrace your steps, and see where the route took you, which plants, proto plants and prior organisms you visited along the way. Alternatively click on the compass icon in the bottom left, the top icon. You will be shown a list of the main classifications, and you can click on each one, and go there. If you do this, notice how the occurrence of 'Land Plants', 'Vascular Plants', 'Seed Plants' and 'Flowering Plants' occur close to each other. These were evolutionary developments that occurred relatively close together in time, and resulted in the spread of plants across the land which changed just about everything in the world at that time. From then on the diversification of green, vascular, seed plants on the land has been enormous. Just look at how many branches, twigs, shoots and finally, leaves, you pass through from 'Flowering Plants' onward. This is biodiversity.

Try some other species - try a moss, a non vascular plant, like Ectropothecium ichnotocladum. Yes. It doesn't roll off the tongue. Then come back to 'True Mosses' using the compass icon. About 17 thousand species, which hardly compares with the 400 thousand of flowering plants. Ferns (Polypodiopsida) and Clubmosses (Lycopodiopsida) likewise. And yet ferns and mosses, of primitive types, dominated the world until the vascular plants, the plants we are familiar with around us, evolved explosively. Then the world changed, And it is only for the good fortune that they did evolve, that we can live today. I will explore what that meant in my next blog - it is crucial to understanding how West Cork developed.

OneZoom is a fantastic piece of software for visualisation. Play with it. But remember. This was created by voluntary work, so there are some out there who wish to disseminate knowledge and understanding without the need for monetary payment in return. This is just an example of how technology can be of such enormous use and facility.