Welcome to evogeneao.com!

This website seeks to promote the teaching and acceptance of the biological theory of evolution by emphasizing one of its great lessons: that life on Earth is one big extended family, and therefore we are related in an exact way to not only every other living thing, but also to every thing that ever lived.

This view of life can be thought of as 'evolutionary genealogy'. The name of this website - evogeneao - is a play on this term.

To teach this lesson, this website uses a newly created Great Tree of Life diagram, and genealogical estimates of our cousin and removal relationship with fellow creatures. The Great Tree of Life was created to show the detailed branching relationships that have evolved through time between all living things. Estimating the number of generations along branches of the Great Tree of Life back to common ancestors yields our genealogical cousin and removal relationships. Other wonderful trees of life have been drawn, but the one on this website is a bit different, in that it shows all the major and many of the minor branches of life, and ties all of it to a geologic time scale. It also shows a few of the major branches of life that have gone extinct, and hints at changes in diversity through time, especially at times of mass extinction. http://tolweb.org/tree Many authors have pointed out that we are cousins to all other living things, but this website is the first to actually make numerical estimates of cousin and removal relationships by counting up the approximate number of generations back to common ancestors.

An early tree of life was published by German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919)
in the late 1800's. Haeckel was an early and ardent supporter of Darwin's theory of biological evolution. Haeckel put humans at the top of his tree of life on the same main branch as apes.