We examine the Tree of Life (TOL) as an evolutionary hypothesis and a heuristic. The original TOL hypothesis has failed but a new "statistical TOL hypothesis" is promising. The TOL heuristic usefully organizes data without positing fundamental evolutionary truth. This article was reviewed by W. Ford Doolittle, Nicholas Galtier and Christophe Malaterre.
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O’Malley et al. (2011) studied this question.