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A Wikipedia-Style Tree of Life Emerges
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive, of biological taxonomies. In the current version, data from nearly 500 evolutionary timelines has been assembled into a single, searchable view of all known life forms; From the CSM report:
Building the computer code and compiling the data took three years, and involved collaborators from Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, the Web development firm Interrobang, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, Duke University, and George Washington University.
"Many participants on the project contributed hundreds of hours tracking down and cleaning up thousands of trees from the literature, then selecting 484 of them that were used to generate the draft tree of life," said Cody Hinchliff, a scientist from the University of Idaho, in the announcement.
This should have been in the summary. For those who don't know:
- Christian Science as a religion has strong anti-science beliefs, including rejection of modern medicine in favour of prayer. BUT ...
- The CSM newspaper is a highly respected news source, mostly independent from the religion except for a daily editorial. Think of it as being sponsored by the church.
It has won seven Pulitzer Prizes.