OUP Blog — Darwin’s tree of life and Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements share a number of interesting parallels, the most meaningful of which lie in the central role that each plays in its respective domain.
Darwin’s tree of life, incidentally the only diagram of which appears in his book The Origin of Species, is a sketch of the central idea that all animal species have a common descent, much like members of an extended family can be displayed on a genealogical tree. Mendeleev’s periodic table is likewise the central icon for chemistry and serves to summarize and classify all the elements, the ways in which they show similarities among themselves, and how they react and bond with other elements.
Eric Scerri is a leading philosopher of science specializing in the history and philosophy of chemistry and especially the periodic table. He is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Foundations of Chemistry and has been a full-time lecturer at UCLA for the past twenty years where he regularly teaches classes of 350 chemistry students as well as classes in the history and the philosophy of science. Altogether, Scerri has authored or edited a total of 11 books and over 150 journal articles.
David Reznick is a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organimal Biology at the University of California, Riverside. His field of study is the process of evolution by natural selection from an experimental perspective.