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Douglas_Knight comments on Rationality Quotes November 2009 - Less Wrong
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Linnaeus had a tree of taxonomy, but this claims that the tree of descent was one of the key innovations of Darwin (and of Wallace, who thought it was innovative before he thought of natural selection).
A complete tree of descent (all life from a common ancestor) was Charles Darwin's thinking, but the idea of a tree of descent was not. See, eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon for 18th-century thinking on the subject.
Maybe I shouldn't have called it an innovation: the main point was to dispute that the tree of life was "widely known and accepted."