Assembling the Tree of Life

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 592 pages
• Published by: Oxford University Press, USA July 22, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0195172345
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0195172348
• Book Dimensions: 11 x 8.6 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 3.6 pounds

Product Review

"Assembling the Tree of Life presents a preliminary view of one of the grand enterprises of modern science, resolving the phylogeny of all life This volume, the product of a 2002 symposium by the same name held at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, seeks to blow away the mist and reveal the structure of the whole Tree and, in doing so, galvanize the systematics community toward unifying its goals." -- Science


Product Description
This edited volume is provides an authoritative synthesis of knowledge about the history of life. All the major groups of organisms are treated, by the leading workers in their fields. With sections on: The Importance of Knowing the Tree of Life; The Origin and Radiation of Life on Earth; The Relationships of Green Plants; The Relationships of Fungi; and The Relationships of Animals. This book should prove indispensable for evolutionary biologists, taxonomists, ecologists interested in biodiversity, and as a baseline sourcebook for organismic biologists, botanists, and microbiologists. An essential reference in this fundamental area.

Reader Reviews
As a researcher working on microbial evolution I found this book quite useful as a summary of what is currently known about phylogeny of the various groups of microbes (as well as satisfying idle curiosity about the relations of various macrobes that the bulk of the book deals with). My only criticism is that in some cases the authors of the individual chapters chose unfortunately not to address the declared topic of their assigned chapter but rather to use the space to discuss something else. In particular, one learns little about the phylogeny of Bacteria and Archaea in Ford Doolittle's chapter of that name; instead Doolittle mostly discusses his theories on lateral gene transfer which, while certainly interesting if one hasn't read about them elsewhere, are not very helpful in a reference book on phylogeny. A similar argument could be made with Herve Philippe's chapter on early eukaryotic evolution, which mostly discusses problems of long branch attraction. However, other chapters in the book such as those of Baldauf, et al. and Norm Pace do cover microbial phylogeny in a more useful manner, so all is not lost by such digressions.