ERNEST RUTHERFORD once dismissed all of the science that falls outside physics as mere “stamp collecting”. No doubt he would have been particularly unimpressed with taxonomy, whose practitioners devote hours to the minute differences between species. What wider insight is there to be gained from this most blatant form of scientific stamp collecting?
Plenty. A study of the family tree of ray-finned fish (see “Most fish in the sea evolved on land”) demonstrates how all those painstaking observations can add up to a remarkable result: in this case, that the ancestors of three-quarters of marine fish lived in fresh…
