You’ve seen evolutionary maps before. Even Charles Darwin used the metaphor, envisioning an earlier species that gave rise to new ones, each new species splitting off as a branch of an ever-growing tree.
That's where this piece of ignorant schadenfreude in Wired lost me. To suggest that Darwin was using some old metaphor that was tired in his day is to fundamentally fail to grasp what that little sketch of his did, how profoundly it changed the way we think about life. A different sentence at the very end of the piece doesn't begin to make amends.
OK, so the bun-fight among the cladists can help while away an idle few minutes on the intertubes, but Sheesh.
I far preferred the rumble between evolution-by-jerks and evolution-by-creeps.
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