Transcript: If you looked at a biology book from a hundred years ago or even fifty years ago, you would have seen a diagram called the tree of life. In the traditional version of this diagram, it is represented as a tree. The simplest organisms are at the bottom of the tree, and more complex, sophisticated, or intelligent organisms are higher up the tree. In traditional representations of the tree of life, primates and humans are at the pinnacle of the tree or the apex representing the highest form of evolution. The tree of life is seductive because it gives the sense that all evolution was leading up to this point, to us at the pinnacle of creation and evolution after billions of years. The traditional tree of life has now been replaced by modern biology’s version of the tree of life based on deviations of DNA and the idea of a common ancestor in DNA for every living form on the Earth. The modern tree of life has many branches and pieces, but basically it’s simple. There is a common ancestor and three major branches on the tree: one corresponding to bacteria, one called archaea, and the other for eukarea. In the branch for eukarea, plants, animals, and fungi form three twigs on the branch, and humans are of course a tiny twig off the animal twig. This means that contrary to the traditional view, humans are just a twig on the tree of life and not the center of creation or the endpoint of evolution.