Click on all links?

The newest tree of life is a sweeping, elegant thing. We may never have all the dots, but it’s already teaching us... how little we know, how differently life has behaved. And it may finally explain mysteries such as why humans have a chin-and what we might evolve into next

- Bhanuj Kappal [e-mail]

It started quietly; with single cells dividing in the dark.

From that microscopic revolution came multicellular life; the strange Cambrian creatures that once ruled the seas; the fish that crept onto land; early reptiles; furry mammals that scurried beneath dinosaurs; apes, elephants, whales, giraffes, humans.

We may never have a complete map of what goes where, on the grand, sprawling expanse that is this “tree of life”.

There have been times when we weren't even sure it was a single tree. But data shows it is. And now, we're parsing information in milliseconds, building branches armed with more information on a single species than entire libraries contained a century ago.

Max Telford represents the most exciting phases in this journey, in his debut book, The Tree of Life: Solving Science's Greatest Puzzle. The British evolutionary biologist and professor at University College London has spent three decades studying the tangled bonds that link living things.

In his book, he zooms out: what exactly have we learnt about how all living beings — bacteria, plants, worms, mushrooms, humans; past and present — are connected? This puzzle has occupied scientists since Charles Darwin first sketched a spindly tree in his notebook in 1837, alongside the note: “I think.”

Leaf of faith

Darwin's doodle has been replaced by vast computer-generated diagrams. ‘The latest is a swirling shape reminiscent of a fern.