Geophylogenies and the Map of Life

Extract

“The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree …the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”

Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859)

THE VISION

One hundred and fifty years after Charles Darwin wrote these words, two major ongoing Web-based scientific projects are collating information on the earth's biological diversity. The Encyclopaedia of Life (EoL; Wilson 2003) provides a single interface through which information on each “being of the same class” can be accessed, whereas The Tree of Life (ToL) Web project (http://tolweb.org/; Maddison and Schulz 2007; Maddison et al. 2007) places these classes onto an evolutionary tree. Here, I propose that a third complementary project should now be considered, the “Map of Life” (MoL), in which all we know about the biogeographical history of life—including clades, species, their genes, and the communities they are members of—is ”threaded” through a dynamic earth history, capturing the spatiotemporal pathways that underlie current and past patterns of biodiversity.