Astronomers Use Darwinism To Make Family Tree Of Nearby Stars

For the first time, astronomers have used advanced algorithms taken from evolutionary biology and successfully applied them to make a phylogenetic family tree of 22 nearby stars. In a paper appearing in the journal The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the authors report that they have taken a page from the work of Charles Darwin in an effort to do stellar genealogy on a sampling of stars within our own galaxy. "We worked together with people from evolutionary biology and basically applied the principles of biology to astronomy," Paula Jofre, the paper's lead author and an astronomer at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told me. "We used the chemical elements of the stars as if they were the DNA and used genetic algorithms that have been built in evolutionary biology to create the trees." Astronomers hope to use this new data to develop a genealogical family tree of millions of our galaxy's stars.