The Coral of Life

The Tree of Life (ToL) has been of central importance in the biological sciences, usually understood as a model or a metaphor, and portrayed in various graphical forms to summarize the history of life as a single diagram. If it is seen as a mathematical construct—a rooted graph theoretical tree or, as more recently viewed, a directed network [Network of Life (NoL)]—then its proper visualization is not feasible, for both epistemological and technical reasons.