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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—Tree of Life:
At the end of Chapter 4, Darwin summarizes his argument thus far with an extended simile and a metaphor comparing the evolution of life on earth to the growth of an old tree:
As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.
Darwin describes earlier in the passage how early life was like the early stages of tree growth: a single species shot up like a sapling and then branched into a few "budding" species, like little offshoots. Like the new growth on a maturing tree, species have fought one another to establish themselves as "branches" on the metaphorical "Tree of Life." Only some species make it, and often new species beat out older ones. The species that go extinct fall to the ground like "dead and broken branches." Darwin has some fun here with the way his simile slides neatly into metaphor: the "dead and broken branches," he writes, incorporate into the "crust of the earth." Technically, dead tree branches on the ground do decompose into the ground and become part of the very top layer of the earth's crust. What Darwin is getting at, though, is the fossil record. Species that have fallen off the "Tree of Life" have turned into the fossils that humans have unearthed and begun studying as records of natural history. The species still alive today are the living branches and buds on the Tree of Life, but eventually many of them, too, will fall to the ground and turn into fossils.
Darwin's Tree of Life simile is an interesting counterpoint to some of his other similes and metaphors comparing natural selection to war and other forms of fierce and brutal competition. While he does emphasize the way buds and branches are always fighting to "overtop" one another, ultimately the tree is a single organism. Darwin refers elsewhere to the "division of physiological labor," the notion that different kinds of tissue perform different functions within a single organism. The branches of the Tree of Life compete with one another to accomplish their own ends, but each of them is also working to keep the tree itself standing. In fact, the more competition there is, the more the tree flourishes.
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