Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics

A Bird Family Tree

Mendelian genetics helps fill in the branches on the Darwinian “Tree of Life.”

The “Early Bird” project, led by Dr. Shannon Hackett of Chicago’s Field Museum, aims to chart genetic links among major groups of birds. Part of the National Science Foundation’s “Assembling the Tree of Life” initiative, “Early Bird” is a collaborative effort involving scientists from around the world. The project will generate 9 million total “base pairs” (the basic unit of DNA) from some 300 bird species. It has already clarified many family connections among birds and stimulated new questions for research.

Dr. Hackett says:

“Trees of life are actually fairly simple concepts. The same way you’re interested in your own geneaology—your relationships with your parents, your grandparents and your great-

grandparents—those are the same kinds of concepts that we’re interested in, but across much longer timescales. So, not just how individuals might be related to each other, but how populations, species, classes, or even phyla are related to each other.

“In order to preserve biodiversity, we have to know not just what’s found in an area, but how these species are related to each other, what the evolutionary history of these areas might be. Trees of Life are the fundamental organizing tool that allows us to transmit this information.”

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