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Fine Read­ing: Ar­bo­real Mat­ters

by Elio

The Tree of Life vies with the Ori­gin of Life for a po­si­tion of high­est sig­nif­i­cance among bi­o­log­i­cal con­cerns. Those who write about it (bioar­borists?) have much to say about its anatomy. Does it con­sist of sim­ple branches, as per Darwin's sketch, or is it anas­to­mosed into a bram­ble of con­nected branches? This mat­ters. By one scheme, an­ces­try can be di­rectly dis­cerned, by the other, much ex­tra in­for­ma­tion is re­quired. Ge­neal­o­gists know how hard it is to trace fam­ily trees when some DNA found its way into the lin­eage by, shall we say, a sup­ple­men­tary route.

Tree of Life, by Gus­tav Klimt (1909)

But here is food for those who want to be en­light­ened. A spe­cial is­sue of the jour­nal Bi­ol­ogy and Phi­los­o­phy is en­ti­tled The Tree of Life. Edited by the British bio­philoso­pher (is there such a term?) Mau­reen O'Malley, it con­sists of fif­teen chap­ters writ­ten by ex­perts in the field. Mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gists will find this to be an im­por­tant ad­di­tion to their long list of things to read, be­ing that some 90% of evo­lu­tion took place while life was solely mi­cro­bial.

 

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Maureen O'Malley
15 years ago

Thank you im­mensely for fea­tur­ing our spe­cial is­sue on this very spe­cial blog, and apolo­gies that the for­mer is not open ac­cess. If any­one can't get hold of a de­sired pa­per, please con­tact me for a copy (google my name plus Ex­eter). 'Bio­philoso­pher' sounds like a term that should have much more cur­rency than it does — I'll la­bel my­self that from now on. I'm a Kiwi (NZer), but do work in the land of the Poms (aka Brits).

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coldtoes
15 years ago

Thanks for that rec­om­mended read­ing — it is food for thought.
As for the term bio­philoso­pher — hhm, I have a wide va­ri­ety of in­ter­ests, that in­clude phi­los­o­phy and mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. Any­one know where I can qual­ify as a bio­philoso­pher? Or is it all on-the-job train­ing? 🙂

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Elio Schaechter
15 years ago

Elio replies:
Thanks, Mau­reen, for the kind words and the gen­er­ous of­fer to pro­vide pa­pers from your book. I hope that read­ers will avail them­selves of this op­por­tu­nity to read such fine pa­pers. By the way, I never met a Kiwi I didn't like!
In re­sponse to Cold­toes, you have my bless­ings. In my view, any­one who se­ri­ously pro­fesses to have such in­ter­ests ought to qual­ify as a bio­philoso­pher. Alas, go­ing to the font of all knowl­edge, Google, re­vealed that the term has been co-opted for "a branch of phi­los­o­phy that as­sumes that all philo­soph­i­cal sys­tems are based on bi­o­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples, such as evo­lu­tion, brain func­tion, and eco­log­i­cal sys­tems. See http://biophilosophy.org/index.php/What_is_biophilosophy%3F and http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Biophilosophy
There is a book at Ama­zon en­ti­tled "Foun­da­tions of Bio­phi­los­o­phy" for a cool $ 103. Jonas Salk wrote ex­ten­sively on his view of bio­phi­los­o­phy.
I would have pre­ferred that the term sim­ply de­note the study of the phi­los­o­phy of bi­ol­ogy, but it seem to have the con­verse mean­ing, the study of the bi­ol­ogy of phi­los­o­phy!
Bio­philoso­phers, please pipe in. You have noth­ing to lose but your self­ish genes!

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