ANDRZEJ KRAUZ
Someone who “can’t see the forest for the trees” is so bogged down in minutiae that the larger context gets missed. It’s a problem for a lot of researchers, and yet getting lost in the trees can occasionally lead to serendipitous new discovery. This issue of The Scientist boasts a number of articles by and about people who are doing just that: using trees both figuratively and literally to fit data into a bigger picture.
First on the tree list: Ernst Haeckel’s famous Pedigree of Man diagram, originally published in 1874—a gnarly old tree with a thick trunk that rises straight up to H. sapiens at its apex—is featured in the Foundations column. Haeckel’s construction of the tree reflected his view that the developmental stages ...
