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.”
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.”