Insects are a pretty big deal

There’s another paper in Science which I don’t have much intelligent to say about, but which I want to point to because it seems really cool, Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution. Earlier work in phylogenetics tended to use a few characters or genetic markers. As noted in the abstract they used nearly 1,500 protein coding genes to construct this phylogeny. Some of my friends who know particular organisms have objected to specific branching patterns near the tips, but what I’d like to emphasize is how ancient insect lineages seem to be. Our own mammalian branch of the tree of life really only diversified over the last ~100 million years or so. Most of the big groups of insects had already started to coalesce by 300 million years ago! As far as land animals goes, insects are incredibly diverse and ancient. Near the end of the paper they state: “The almost linear increase in interordinal insect diversity suggests that the process of diversification of extant insects may not have been severely affected by the Permian and Cretaceous biodiversity crises.” There will always be insects….