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12 - Making Sense with Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2022

Ronald A. Jenner
Affiliation:
Natural History Museum, London
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Summary

Finally, in this chapter I offer a concluding meditation on the undiminished value, indeed the necessity, of evolutionary storytelling, if our goal is to go beyond the trees and try to understand what may have happened along life’s myriad evolving lineages. As soon as one looks at a tree and asks ‘what does this mean?’, one becomes an evolutionary storyteller. Some dismiss such stories as pure fiction, and would prefer not to go beyond the tree. But for those of us who wish to peer over the phylogenetic frontier, these stories are how we generate our understanding of evolution, or at least how we try to.

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Ancestors in Evolutionary Biology
Linear Thinking about Branching Trees
, pp. 327 - 335
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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