Phylogenic Entanglement

2022  30”h, 22”W  collage

With increasingly accurate observational techniques available to scientists, evidence has accumulated that biological and physical states of being are less discrete and more entangled than previously thought. The particles physicists study are entangled; the hemispheres of the human brain are interconnected by the firing of neurons; and, as this collage illustrates, species are not neatly differentiated like branches on a tree. The misleading “cladogram” envisioned by Darwin (a diagram that depict the relationships between different groups of taxa or “clades”) did not comprehend microbial entities that enter plant and animal genomes via horizontal gene transfer and account for part of all biological and botanical inheritance. The tangled branches of our “trees” must reconverge.

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