Darwin’s muses behind his 1859 diagram
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2013.763n5009Keywords:
Evolutionary tree, The tree of life, Evolution, Darwin, GenealogyAbstract
This article uses a review of a number of tree diagrams to highlight how the fact that Darwin was to choose the metaphor of a tree to describe evolutionary relationships between organisms should come as no great surprise, as the tree already occupied an important position in European iconography. In the review of some of the uses of a “tree” to represent different types of relationships in the pre-Darwinian age, we want to illustrate two basic issues. One particularly important issue is that Darwin had the insight of including various symbols and metaphors that were already being used to represent different aspects of the living world in his own theory of evolution, particularly the general metaphor of branching and rebranching. The other is that when Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, people were already familiar with the idea of a tree to represent genealogy. This may have been an important factor in people’s familiarity with evolutionary diagrams and also in strongly associating them with religious metaphors.
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