Tree diagrams show the relationships among objects. In these early examples, elements or people are represented by shapes and their relationships by connecting lines. In tree diagrams s each item in the tree can have only a single ancestor but any number of descendants, and all elements in the tree are connected to each other through links of ancestor/descendant relations. Despite the colloquial use of the term ‘family tree’, tree diagrams are not suitable to record family relationships because they do not allow for more than one parent and do not have a mechanism for depicting non-descendant relationships such as marriage; diagrams that show these famiily relations are kinship diagrams.
Richard C. Shimeall (1802–1874). A Complete Historical, Chronological, Geographical & Genealogical Chart of the Sacred Scriptures from Adam to Christ. Philadelphia, H.S. Tanner, 1832.
The centrepiece of this giant infographic, published in 1832 by Richard Shimeall, is a formalized family tree or kinship diagram of people in the Christian Bible. This diagram is made in the style of many scientific diagrams of the era and relies on the way people of that time associated detailed diagrams with authority in order to lend credibility to the biblical stories it depicts. In addition, through its sheer size and density of information, this early infographic is designed to overwhelm the senses as a way of reducing the viewer’s access to critical evaluation.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: J. Murray, 1859.
Inductiveload, Diagram in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, 1859,” 2009, diagram, Wikimedia Commons, accessed March 15, 2023, https://commons .wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5868113.
Charles Darwin used the metaphor of a ‘tree of life’ to add explanatory power to his theory of evolution. It is represented by this diagram, the only illustration in On the Origin of Species. It shows the evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms in a timeframe covering thousands of years and generations. Each section of the vertical axis (I–XIV) represents a thousand generations. The horizontal axis delineates how initial species (A–L) evolved through time. At the bottom, after fourteen thousand generations, descendants of A and I have become fourteen new species, Species F remains unchanged, and all the other species have become extinct.
