Assembling the Tree of Life: Where We Stand at the Beginning of the 21st Century

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Few endeavors in biology, or in all the sciences, can match our quest to understand the course of life’s history on Earth, which stretches across billions of years and captures the descent of untold millions of species. The notion that scientific inquiry might achieve that goal is little more than a century and a half old, and yet surprisingly, most of the species that have appeared on the twigs of the Tree of Life (TOL) have been put there only in the last decade. The systematists who have contributed to the chapters in this volume have collectively contributed a significant step toward a grand vision of systematic biology: achieving a comprehensive picture of the TOL is finally within our grasp. Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley, and the other giants who convinced the world of life’s long history of change, and built the first scaffold of that history, might very well say “finally . . . it’s about time”! al. (1996), Fortey and Thomas (1998), Littlewood and Bray (2001), and Judd et al. (2002) are but five examples that have been published in recent years—as well as to the numerous journals publishing phylogenetic results in every issue.</jats:p>