Given the transfer of genes across species, is the tree of life not really a tree? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with ...

In 1977, Woese and Fox proposed the Archaea as a new domain of life and that the tree of life is divided into three branches — the Eukarya, Bacteria and Archaea. Although a three-domain tree was ...

The tree of life might seem like a stable design, appropriate for indelible ink. Plenty of people think so. An Internet search for “phylogenetic tattoos” turns up some showy skin art. But the branches ...

Carl Woese may be the greatest scientist you’ve never heard of. “Woese is to biology what Einstein is to physics,” says Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. A ...

Taxonomy is an organizing principle of biology and is ideally based on evolutionary relationships among organisms. Development of a robust bacterial taxonomy has been hindered by an inability to ...

All species on Earth, both living and extinct, are related. We know this because of a biological tool called the tree of life. This "tree" takes the form of a diagram that maps the relationships ...

The tree of life, which depicts how life has evolved and diversified on the planet, is getting a lot more complicated. Researchers at UC Berkeley, who have discovered more than 1,000 new types of ...