Evolutionary Trees

Metaphor: Evolution is often pictured as a branching “tree of life” — neat limbs sprouting from a single trunk, each species occupying its proper twig on a tidy diagram. From Darwin’s original sketch to glossy museum wall charts, the tree metaphor promises clarity: divergence, order, and natural hierarchy.

Problem / Misleading Aspect: The “tree” suggests a tidy, one-way branching process, where species split cleanly and never meet again. But evolutionary history is riddled with reticulation: hybridisation, gene flow, and horizontal transfers blur boundaries everywhere. Evolution is not a stately oak but a tangled thicket — more unruly hedge than tree. By hiding these messier dynamics, the metaphor construes the past as a set of fixed categories with clear separations, obscuring the relational overlaps that define life’s history.

Relational Ontology Correction: Evolution is not a tree but an ongoing relational weave. Species are not discrete branches but dynamic alignments of genetic, ecological, and social potentials, co-constituted through interaction. History does not tidy itself into neat forks; it actualises as overlapping and recombining patterns of possibility. To treat evolution as a tree is to misrecognise a tangled relational field as a set of separable limbs.

Parody: If evolution really were a tree, biologists would be arborists, taxonomists would carry pruning shears, and cladistics would require fertiliser. We’d worry about Dutch elm disease wiping out mammals, or call in the council to remove dangerous “dead branches” from the primate clade. The absurdity points back to the misstep: taking the metaphor literally hides the unruly, relational complexity of life’s unfolding.