Tree of Life
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Scientists since Linaeus have classified living things according to a general categorisation method invented by the ancient Greeks. If you classify related objects by this method and draw a diagram of it, the diagram will be tree-shaped.
Each item in the tree is a category described by (1) its kind (genus) and (2) the things that make it different from others of its kind (differentiae). This method has been applied to classifying living things in various different ways.
See Nested heirarchy for more discussion of the concept, and Nested Heirarchies for its significance to attempts to find evidence for or against biological evolution.
Tree of Life is a project to classify all organisms into an evolutionary tree.
In the Bible a different "Tree of Life" is referred to particularly in three books: Genesis 2:9; 3:22,24; Proverbs 3:18; 11:30; 13:12; 15:4; Revelation 2:7; 22:2,14. The symbolic use of this tree in Revelation and its metaphorical use in Proverbs are sometimes taken to suggest that it is also symbolic in Genesis. See also The Two Trees.
