On a grander scale, the biological history of life itself weaves the career of the human race into a context of profound interconnectivity.
It's natural to contemplate your origins, the place and culture you come from, your ancestors and the history of your family. It's even more profound to contemplate your biological origins, your ancestry into species unrecognizable from your own.
It really is a humbling experience to trace a path thousands and even millions of years into the past. The end result is an increased appreciation for the beauty of nature and for the inseparable unity of the human race.
Be awed by the beauty but also be wary of the horror that is existence.
Awe, beauty and horror are human concepts. Do not let that bias cloud your logic. When something is beautiful to you, you become blind to the horror. When something is horrible to you, you become blind to the beauty. Best way to view something, is to ignore both, and judge it dispassionately.
Nothing is beautiful, nothing is horrible. That is true understanding.
If there were Schema.org/Animal and/or schema:AnimalInstance classes, what do you list under a :breed property to indicate that e.g. one parent is breed X and another is breed Y?! That's definitely not a DAG; that looks like a feature clustering dendrogram.
DNA barcoding > Mismatches between conventional (morphological) and barcode based identification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcoding#Mismatches_betwe...
Taxonomy (biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)
FWIU, there's at least one DNA-based organism naming system; IDK how much that helps resolve :Animal and :AnimalInstance if at all?
Flight is so useful, it evolved 4 times independently. With very similar solutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_and_gliding_animals
And crustaceans keep evolving into crabs. https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/why-everything-becomes-...
And who even knows how many different times high level intelligence has evolved. I think octopi, birds, and mammals are all good examples of separate intelligence tracks with similar results.
I'm not a biologist, but I found this paper (Podani, 2019) about the "Coral of Life" metaphor interesting: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11692-019-094...
The corals were particularly memorable. My dad's also from a comp sci background, and noticed how the coral colours are RGB.
From other HN posts, I'd been thinking about the Tree of Life, and wondering about roots. Trees are basically mirrored around ground level. But coral grow without roots!
So yes, I like the "Coral of Life" metaphor. It fits well with the Big Bang model, of having a single starting point and growing from there.
Things get tricky when you talk about species, because species are (arbitrary?) equivalency classes of individuals.
To summarize the article (using a more familiar animal):
Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears are different species… Yet they can reproduce! Good god, that means they were once the same species, then different species, and now the same species again! My minds blown!
Silly…
