It took us roughly 3.5 billion years and minimally (but probably way more) some 2.3 million species, to get us to where we are today at the top of the tree of life, and now scientists have published the first draft of an open source "Tree of Life". This public resource is intended to be a sort of "Wikipedia" for scientists and the public alike, exploring and explaining evolutionary relationships that essentially interrelate all lifeforms on the planet.
This digital resource is available at Tree of Life and the idea is that people will add to it as new information becomes available and proven, although having said that, the site appears to be down currently, apparently due to all of the traffic it has seen since the release of the draft! But it's quite interesting that the creators of the Tree of Life (i.e. the digital version, not the living one!) have not only released the big picture, but also the data from which it was constructed as well as the source code.
This tree was assembled via a collaboration involving eleven institutions but was not built from scratch; previous smaller trees including some with over 100,000 species in their branches were used to piece it all together. Roughly 500 of these smaller trees were used to build the bigger picture outlining how microbes, fungi, plants, animals and humans evolved and diverged from each other - and essentially underlining how brilliant Charles Darwin actually was in more recent human history.
This digital resource is available at Tree of Life and the idea is that people will add to it as new information becomes available and proven, although having said that, the site appears to be down currently, apparently due to all of the traffic it has seen since the release of the draft! But it's quite interesting that the creators of the Tree of Life (i.e. the digital version, not the living one!) have not only released the big picture, but also the data from which it was constructed as well as the source code.
This tree was assembled via a collaboration involving eleven institutions but was not built from scratch; previous smaller trees including some with over 100,000 species in their branches were used to piece it all together. Roughly 500 of these smaller trees were used to build the bigger picture outlining how microbes, fungi, plants, animals and humans evolved and diverged from each other - and essentially underlining how brilliant Charles Darwin actually was in more recent human history.
The BBC released a hugely popular documentary "Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life" which was narrated by the indefatigably passionate Sir David Attenborough, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and given the hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube alone, I felt it would be appropriate to share it on this blog regarding the Tree of Life.
As brilliant as the creation of life on this planet unquestionably was and is, for us scientists it is interminably fascinating how all of these 2 million + species originated and evolved together and/or sequentially, which by a combination of some good luck and the precise swathe of the great evolutionary scythe ultimately led to the appearance of the humanoid lifeform currently dominating the planet.
Had we not evolved as we did, and mankind's precursors had not escaped their roots and gotten "out of Africa", what would the world look like today? It's a mind-boggling question and as much as we (perhaps naturally) tend to assume that our appearance out of the jungle's "primeval soup" was inevitable, well, it;s hardly the case. As my mother asked me recently - "Well, if we evolved from apes, then how come they stopped evolving? Where are all the hominids today?"
There is a definitive line of thought that the unending need for water to feed the tree of life drove our ancestors towards the coastal waters in Africa, and it was the dietary changes there that fed the development of the Homo erectus brain. It is suspected that seafood and shellfish rich in fatty acids such as docosahexaenoic acid and arachidonic acid, facilitated the evolution of relatively small-brained hominids into those with increased brain size. The key requirement of these types of fatty acids for mammalian neuronal development may explain the very productive "accident" that the Homo species walked into when splashing around coastal rivers and lakes.
This is by no means a proven theory, and for many the appearance of tools, and fire, and the cooking of meat is regarded as the key step in evolution that led to increased cranial size in hominids. But it seems that evidence of the regular and organised use of fire is not abundant pre-1 million years ago, when cranial size in hominids had measurably increased. It seems entirely possible that aquatic diets may have fed the developing brain, and the subsequent use of fire and cooked meat truly pushed us further along with the critical combination of increased brain size coupled to serious cognitive advances and blossoming intelligence.
In any case, we got to where we are today, one way or another, and this first draft Tree of Life is an inspiring effort to explain it all. But it is a first draft, and it will be just as interesting to see how that tree evolves over time, being elaborated on with our increasing understanding of life on this planet. This tree will be used in the meantime to further scientists' efforts in drug discovery, improve agricultural yields in terms of both animals and plants, and to better understand and tackle infectious diseases.
Now, speaking of dietary elements and brain power, I think it is time for this boy to get his hands on some Madagascar Morning Mellow thereby partaking of some solid caffeine to kickstart the day. Oh, and that coffee also came "out of Africa"!
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