[newaccount1234]

Seeing that the article was about the "Tree of Life" metaphor and Coral, it is surprising that it didn't mention that Darwin actually suggested that a "Coral of Life" metaphor was superior to a "Tree of Life" metaphor in his notebooks (or maybe I missed it?).

I'm not a biologist, but I found this paper (Podani, 2019) about the "Coral of Life" metaphor interesting: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11692-019-094...

[peterburkimsher]

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Fiji and met my parents there. We stayed at Navini Island Resort, the kind of luxury I'd never choose for personal travels, but it was a nice holiday on an island in the South Pacific.

The corals were particularly memorable. My dad's also from a comp sci background, and noticed how the coral colours are RGB.

From other HN posts, I'd been thinking about the Tree of Life, and wondering about roots. Trees are basically mirrored around ground level. But coral grow without roots!

So yes, I like the "Coral of Life" metaphor. It fits well with the Big Bang model, of having a single starting point and growing from there.