10 biggest puzzles of human evolution. Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively.
To continue using our website and consent to the use of cookies, click away from this box or click 'Close' Human nature: Six things we all do. WHAT sort of creature is the human?
The obvious answer is a smart, talkative, upright ape with a penchant for material possessions. But what about the more subtle concept of human nature? Tree of Life Web Project. The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world.
On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny). Each page contains information about a particular group, e.g., salamanders, segmented worms, phlox flowers, tyrannosaurs, euglenids, Heliconius butterflies, club fungi, or the vampire squid. ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life.
Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things.