ABSTRACT
In American popular culture, the tree of life is not an uncommon metaphor: it is generally taken to signify the progress of life, sometimes with a religious or spiritual undertone. The concept takes on a narrower, though no less significant, meaning in biological sciences where Charles Darwin is credited as one of the first to apply "tree thinking" to natural studies. In modern biology, the term "tree of life" is still used, especially in popular communication, though a more accurate term to refer to these visual representations is "phylogenetic diagrams". Darwin's tree of life appeared in the 1850s, and other well-known trees, notably those by German biologist Ernst Haeckel, followed shortly after. However, nineteenth-century US popular science magazines published only a few phylogenetic diagrams. Scientists and science communicators must take public audiences' information needs seriously and treat popular science visual representations not (or not merely) as a way to attract reader attention but as meaningful scientific evidence that they are.
