Bill Baker
speaker
149 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Bill Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, metaphorical, the idea of the metaphorical tree of life has been around for thousands of years.
I mean, religious, mythological, cultural context.
Think of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden or this great tree, Yggdrasil, that connected...
the nine realms of Norse mythology.
But what I'm talking about today is the evolutionary tree of life, so the genealogy of everything that lives and has lived.
And I liken it to the periodic table because the tree of life...
helps us understand the properties of living things, just like the periodic table helps us understand the relationships and properties of the chemical elements.
So if you are looking to find your way through the complexity of biodiversity studies,
The Tree of Life is like a roadmap.
It kind of cuts your workload down because you know you don't have to.
If you're interested, for example, in a group of plants that might produce chemicals that could have medicinal value and you want to explore those plants for their medicinal properties, you don't have to look at every plant.
You can use the Tree of Life and what we call its predictive power to direct your next sampling foray.
So it's really central.
It's the foundation of biology in many respects.
And indeed, the kinds of things that Jenny and Chris have been talking about are all underpinned by concepts of the tree of life.
In a perfect world, we'd be able to reconstruct the tree of life from what we see written in the rocks.
The fossil record would tell us how everything is connected.
But as Chris has just described very clearly, actually the fossil record is very incomplete and it's difficult to piece together.
But there is another kind of fossil record.
There's the molecular fossil record, which...
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