Looking Outwards-07

Graham Murtha

Section A

One of the most fascinating visually represented datasets is perhaps one of the largest single-website collections of information on the internet- OneZoom’s tree of life Explorer. This website graphically represents all of science’s current understanding of biology in the universe, starting from eubacteria, eukaryotes and biota. As you can imagine, there is a ridiculously expansive number of species included in this data set, and the tree emphasizes that by it’s scale- human beings and most familiar mammals happen to take up .001% of the tree’s entire figure, according to the resources’ “about” info. The more you zoom out from where we are in the tree of life, the more you come to realize how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of biology- our species is in no way special, despite the leaps and bounds we’ve come. Only a vectorized graphic such as this could convey such a shockingly accurate scale of life as we know it, and how puny humanity is to nature. The graphic conventions of the tree itself is also fascinating- each species is represented as a circular leaf on a tree, and the closer two species are in evolution, the closer their leaves are on their respective branch. The branches are represented as bending curves that spiral off of their larger parent, which emphasizes the connection between all living things, rather than just linear branches shooting off in their own direction.

It really is an incredible and informative dataset- I recommend everyone to explore it a little!

https://www.onezoom.org/