I just saw a very interesting piece by Ben Zimmer, whose post details 144 words for which Darwin has the earliest recorded use in English (and he compares to Lincoln, who has one). One of these words is “phylogeny”. I was a little surprised because surely Haeckel invented the term phylogeny. Indeed he did, but…
Tag: Haeckel
Confident in your phylogeny?
There has been discussion and research for decades into support values for phylogenetic nodes and the relative quality of different phylogenies as a whole. Here is a new and impressive (although clearly subjective) criteria for confidence in a phylogenetic tree- “I am so confident in this tree I have had it tattooed onto my body”!!!The…
The Ernst Haeckel Stadium
Just watched Spain win the Euro2008 football final in the Ernst Haeckel stadium, Austria. I was really pleased that Haeckel, evolutionary biologist and artist, originator of the term “phylogeny” and many other key concepts, has been honoured with a football stadium in his name. Sadly a bit of Googling has revealed that it is the…