Peer review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/dispatch/story/0,12978,1438868,00.html
Assembling the Tree of Life, ed Joel Cracraft and Michael J Donoghue
Tim Radford
Thursday March 17, 2005
The Guardian
More than 500 pages, more than 80 contributors and two editors: not so
much a book to judge as an epic to salute. This is a salute. Charles
Darwin proposed the metaphor of a tree of life, to replace the medieval
ladder of creation. Now for the first time, systematists and
taxonomists believe that it might be possible to reconstruct the entire
tree, to include all living and extinct species.
This is a tall order in joined-up thinking: 1.7m species have been
named and described, some of them more than once. There could be
another 12m unidentified flying, creeping, crawling objects out there,
to be entered in the family bible in order of kinship. The economic
rewards - improved agriculture, better pest control, more efficient
land use, more effective conservation, advanced human health - could be
huge. But so are the challenges. How do you make sense of an estimated
1.5m species of fungi, or the link between algae and the earliest green
plants? How do you join up the annelids, which range from iceworms in
the Gulf of Mexico to the Pompeii worm that survives in near boiling
water, the little oligochaetes that infect salmon brains and the
polychaetes that bore through clam shells. What is a worm, a subheading
asks poignantly, and what is not? What is the family history of
wingless, sucking and biting lice, and Zoraptera, a group so little
known that the only popular name is a German one: Bodenläuse.
Tree of Life
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=%22Tree%20of%20Life%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=%22Tree+of+Life%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Tree+of+Life%22&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=%22Tree+of+Life%22&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
Practical applications of Evolutionary Biology
http://snipurl.com/coac
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