Some also demand that we abandon the well-established visual metaphor of portraying evolutionary history as a tree, with a discrete trunk, branches, and twigs representing the distribution of genetic information across generations and between the different kingdoms, clades, orders, families, genera, and species that make up all living things. Because when we zoom in tighter on the tree we see that it better resembles an inland river delta comprised of thousands of intersecting channels that variously merge with and split from one another.
