A simplified, silhouette version of the “March of Progress.”

The “March of Progress”, the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as representing evolution, but the tragedy of this is that it conveys a view of life that does not resemble our present understanding of life’s history. Stephen Jay Gould addressed this two decades ago in his book Wonderful Life, in which he wrote;

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress. Most people may know this as a phrase to be uttered, but not