The pedigree of grape varieties


We are all familiar with the concept of a family tree (formally called a pedigree). People have been compiling them for at least a thousand years, as the first known illustration is from c.1000 CE (see the post on The first royal pedigree). However, these are not really tree-like, in spite of their name, unless we exclude most of the ancestors from the diagram. After all, family histories consist of males and females inter-breeding in a network of relationships, and this cannot be represented as a simple tree-like diagram without leaving out most of the people. I have written blog posts about quite a few famous people who have really quite complex and non-tree-like family histories (including Cleopatra, Tutankhamun, Charles II of Spain, Charles Darwin, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Albert Einstein).

A history of disease within an Amish community

Clearly, the history of domesticated organisms is even more complex than that of humans. After all, in most cases we have gone to a great deal of trouble to make these histories complex, by deliberately cross-breeding current varieties (of plants) and breeds (of animals) to make new ones. So, I have previously raised the question: Are phylogenetic trees useful for domesticated organisms? The answer is the same: no, unless you leave out most of the ancestry.

In most cases, we have no recorded history for domesticated organisms, because most of the breeding and propagating was undocumented. Until recently, it was effectively impossible to reconstruct the pedigrees. This has changed with modern access to genetic information; and there is now quite a cottage industry within biology, trying to work out how we got our current varieties of cats, dogs, cows and horses, as well as wheat, rye and grapes, etc. I have previously looked at some of these histories, including Complex hybridizations in wheat, and Complex hybridizations in barley and its relatives.

Grapes

One example of particular interest has been grape varieties. I have discussed some of the issues in a previous post: Grape genealogies are networks, not trees, including the effects of unsampled ancestors when trying to perform the reconstruction.

There are a number of places around the web where you can see heavily edited summaries of what is currently known about the grape pedigree. However, these simplifications defeat the purpose of this blog post, which is to emphasize the historical complexity. The only diagram that I know of that shows you the full network (as currently known) is one provided by Pop Chart (The Genealogy of Wine), a commercial group who provide infographic posters for just about anything. They will sell you a full-sized poster of the pedigree (3' by 2'), but here I have provided a simple overview (which you can click on to see somewhat larger).

Grape variety genealogy from Pop Chart

You can actually zoom in on the diagram on the Pop Chart web page to see all of the details. This allows you to spend a few happy hours finding your favorite varieties, and to see how they are related. You will presumably get lost among the maze of lines, as I did.

Misunderstandings and misrepresentations about Linné’s alleged family motto


This is a joint post by Magnus Lidén and David Morrison

The Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is well known in biology as the father of modern taxonomic nomenclature, although he is better known in his own country for writing a series of travel books that cataloged the cultures and resources of Sweden.* He was knighted in 1757, and took the noble name Carl von Linné, as well as adopting a coat of arms (shown below).

It is often claimed that at the same time he adopted a family motto:
Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit [Latin]
God created, Linnaeus organized [English]
Gud skapade, Linné ordnade [Swedish]
Gott erschuf, Linné ordnete [German]
This claim is repeated around the internet, almost always attributing the words directly to the man himself: Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit he liked to say (Smithsonian Institution); Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit he took as his motto (Harvard University); Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit was how Linnaeus himself summed up his lifetime achievements (Uppsala University; and Svenska Linnésällskapet — the Swedish Linnaean Society).

The motto has been used both to mock him for his presumptuousness and to praise him for his piety. Primary references for this alleged motto are, however, conspicuously absent from any of the web sites, and our search of the literature, as well as consultation with Linné experts, have failed to present any evidence that he ever used this motto himself.

In the standard Linné biography of Fries (1903), it is simply referred to as an "illuminating epigram which admiring contemporaries used" (see Jackson 1923), which does not explain how it came to be attributed to Linnaeus, nor where it come from. FV Hope (Anon. 1843) suspected it had originated as an act of malice. Although it has been used to that end by his adversaries, it was originally meant to express awe and admiration.

As far as we can determine, the first English-language use of the motto appears as the frontispiece of this book:
The Life of Sir Charles Linnæus, Knight of the Swedish Order of the Polar Star, &c, &c.
to which is Added a Copious List of His Works, and a Biographical Sketch of the Life of His Son

By D.H. Stoever, Ph.D.
Translated from the original German
By Joseph Trapp, A.M.
1794
B. and J. White, Fleet Street, London


As you can see, the motto is used as a banner situated directly below the coat of arms of Linné, and to all appearances is a part of it, with a portrait in profile above. This gives the impression that the words were coined by Linné himself (as was the case for the coat of arms).

However, the original German-language version of the book reveals a very different situation:
Leben des Ritters Carl von Linné
Nebst den biographischen Merkwürdigkeiten seines Sohnes, des Professors Carl von Linné
und einem vollständigen Verzeichnisse seiner Schriften, deren Ausgaben, Übersetzungen, Auszüge und Commentare

von Dietrich Heinrich Stöver, Doctor der Philosophie
1792
Benj. Gottl. Hoffmann, Hamburg


The frontispiece has the alleged motto flanking the coat of arms of Linnaeus, rather than being part of it. This makes all the difference to the interpretation. The portrait, incidentally, is a poor copper engraving, drawn from a plaster medallion by Inländer from 1773 (cf. Tullberg 1907).

Stöver reveals his source for the words in his 1792 preface:
Das Motto unter dem Bildnisse Linné's [...] wird hoffentlich mit der Religiosität keines Lesers in Collision kommen. Es rührt von einem Manne her, der ein langer Freund des Vestorbnen war.
However, in the 1794 English translation, "langer Freund" is embellished to the point of confusion:
The motto beneath the portrait of Linnaeus [...] will not, it is humbly presumed, offend the religious opinions of any reader. It originates with a man who has lived many years in the closest ties of intimacy with the deceased.**
Whoever devised it, it seems probable that this phrase is a post-Linnéan laudation communicated to Stöver orally or by letter. At any rate, it do not appear in print until 14 years after Linné's death.

This may seem like a rather harmless "factoid", but it highlights how easily erroneous beliefs can be established, even in a scientific environment.

Other myths

This brings us to a second myth, a misconstruction of the very core of Linné's views on classification, which has seriously distorted how the development of 18th century systematics is perceived. The widely held picture of Linné as an Aristotelian Essentialist, classifying nature by Medieval Scholastic Principles of Logical Division, dates from the work of Cain (1958; see Winsor 2006), and was uncritically accepted by several influential authors, such as Mayr (1982) and Futuyma (1998). But this is like stating that Darwin was a creationist!

On the contrary, the scholastic approach is strongly criticized by Linné. He was the first to clarify the conceptual difference between the top-down divisionis leges (which he claimed will by necessity result in artificial groupings and disruption of natural taxa) and synthetic systematization. Linné emphasized that natural taxa are not defined by characters but must be built from the basic entities (species) upwards (Linnaeus 1737). He was far ahead of his time in doing this. The misrepresentation of Linné's views by Cain's and his followers has been thoroughly debunked by, for example, Skvortsov (2002), Winsor (2006), Müller-Wille (2013) and others, but it seems to be hard to eradicate.

A more amusing misunderstanding is the so-called flower clock, reputedly planted by Linné in the Hortus Academicus of Uppsala (now called Linnéträdgården, The Linné garden), about which numerous visitors and journalists ask each year. However, Linné's flower clock (1751) was a list of selected phenological observations, which never materialized in the Uppsala academic garden as an actual plantation, nor was it ever meant to. Attempts to plant flower clocks in gardens have shown that they are not very accurate as to general time-keeping across seasons and latitudes.

Note:
It seems to be quite common in English to insist on the use of titles for British people but not for foreigners. As noted by Stöver and Trapp in their book, "Carl von Linné" is best treated as the Swedish equivalent of "Sir Carl Linnaeus".

References

Anon. (1843) Summary of a lecture by F. V. Hope – on the portraits of Linnaeus – read for the Linnean society 21 Feb 1843 (E. Forster, Esq. in the chair). The Athenæum (Journal of english and Foreign Literature, Science and the Fine Arts) 801: 218. [in vol. 1 for the year 1843, installments 783 to 817]

Cain AJ (1958) Logic and memory in Linnaeus' system of taxonomy. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 169: 144-163.

Fries TM (1903) Linné. Lefnadsteckning, 2 vols. Stockholm.

Futuyma DJ (1998) Evolutionary Biology, 3 edn. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland MA.

Jackson BD (1923) Linnaeus. Abridged and adapted from Fries 1903. London.

Linnaeus C (1737) Genera Plantarum. Conrad Wishoff, Leiden.

Linnaeus C (1751) Philosophia Botanica. Godofr. Kiesewetter, Stockholm.

Mayr E (1982) The Growth of Biological Thought. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Müller-Wille S (2013) Systems and how Linnaeus looked at them in retrospect. Annals of Science 70: 305-317.

Skvortsov AK (2002) Systematics on the threshold of the 21st century: traditional principles and basics from the contemporary viewpoint. Zhurnal Obshchei Biologii 63: 82-93. [In Russian; abridged translation by Irina Kadis on WWW]

Tullberg T (1907) Linnéporträtt. Aktiebolaget Ljus, Stockholm.

Winsor MP (2006) Linnaeus' biology was not essentialist. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 93: 2-7.



* On May 18 we had Linnés trädgårdsfest, which is Uppsala's celebration of Linné's working life in the town.

**According to Guido Grimm, a more literal translation would be: "It originates from an old friend of the deceased, who, being of rare noble character, summarized the widely accepted opinion(s) of experts".

Morgan Colman and English royal genealogies


I noted in an earlier post (Drawing family trees as trees) that from 1576 CE Scipione Ammirato, an Italian writer and historian, set up a cottage industry producing family trees for the nobility. Over the years, he was not the only person to try to make money this way.

In the English-speaking world, one of these was Morgan Colman (or Coleman), who produced an impressively large genealogy of King James I and Queen Anne, in 1608. Nathaniel Taylor has commented: "Of all the congratulatory heraldic and genealogical stuff prepared early in James’s reign, this might be the most impressive piece of genealogical diagrammatic typography."

Unfortunately, we do not have a complete copy of this family tree. It was published as a set of quarto-sized bifolded sheets that needed to be joined together. Below is a small image of the copy in the British Library, which gives you an idea of the intended arrangement, and its incompleteness (click to enlarge). Taylor has a larger PDF copy available here.


The WorldCat library catalog lists the work as "Most noble Henry ; heire (though not son)", which is the first line of the dedicatory verse at the top left. Elsewhere, I have seen it referred to as "The Genealogies of King James and Queen Anne his wife, from the Conquest".

It is usually described as "a genealogy of James I and Anne of Denmark in 10 folio sheets [sic], with their portraits in woodcut, accompanied by complimentary verses to Henry Prince of Wales, the Duke of York (Prince Charles) and Princess Elizabeth, and with the coats-of-arms of the nobles living in 1608 and of their wives."

A Christies auction notes the sale of an illuminated manuscript of the "Genealogy of the Kings of England, from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth 1", produced by Colman in 1592. The accompanying text reads (in part):
Colman, a scribe and heraldic painter, was steward and secretary to various eminent public figures, including successive Lord Keepers of the Great Seal, Sir John Puckering (1592-96) and Sir Thomas Egerton (1596-1603) who caused his election as MP for Newport, Cornwall in 1597. Heraldic and genealogical compositions were his speciality and in 1608 he had composed, and prepared for printing, genealogies of King James and his Queen published as ten large quarto sheets; in 1622 a payment records his work for James I in producing two large and beautiful tables for the King's lodgings in Whitehall and for making many of the genealogical tables for 'His Majesty's honour and service'. But these successes were a distant prospect in 1592 when he produced the present manuscript: in that year he petitioned for the post of York Herald and a second petition at about this date, possibly to Sir John Puckering, solicits the addressee's continued support for his advancement. This genealogy appears therefore to be part of a campaign to secure employment: the writer ends his summary of contents 'Wherein if the simplicity of well-meaning purpose, maie procure desired accept'on then rest persuaded that the industrious hand is fullie prepared spedelie to produce matter for more ample contentment.' The inclusion of Francis Bacon's arms at the end of his work shows that Colman had hopes of securing Bacon's patronage: by 1592 Bacon's political and legal career was well established, he was confidential adviser to the Earl of Essex, the Queen's favourite, and had hopes of high office. Colman, however, hedged his bets; another copy of this genealogy survives, though incomplete and lacking the arms of a recipient.
Colman apparently petitioned for the office of herald in the latter part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, but never obtained it.

Motivations for producing the earliest pedigrees


The stemmata in ancient Roman houses (depicting portraits of ancestors) were used to assert the nobility of the nobles by right of family descent — stemmata distinguished between the patrician class (those with noble ancestry) and plebeians (commoners). It is therefore unsurprising that the Medieval nobility subsequently started to produce diagrams, as their way of illustrating their own succession in unambiguous terms (although it was not until much later that genealogies became common).

For example, as discussed in my post on The first royal pedigree, the earliest known illustration of a family tree is from c.1000 CE (see Schmid 1994), in which Cunigunde of Luxembourg's ancestry is traced in a tree-like manner to include the emperor Charlemagne (Charles the Great), thus legitimizing her claim to being of royal descent — she married Henry, Duke of Bavaria, in 999 CE, and he became King Henry II of Germany in 1002, at which point she became Queen consort of Germany (1002-1024).

However, pedigrees were also produced for the opposite purpose — to try to prevent marriages, for example on the basis that they violated church law. The earliest known such case involved the marriage, in 1043 CE, of King Henry III of Germany (1016-1056, later Emperor Heinrich of the Holy Roman Empire) to Agnès of Poitou (1025-1077).

Heinrich was briefly (1036-1038) married to Gunhilda of Denmark. After her death, for political reasons he wanted to remarry with someone from France. He chose the young daughter of Duke William V of Aquitaine. She thus became Queen consort of Germany (1043-1056) and then Empress consort of the Holy Roman Empire (1046-1056); from 1056-1061 she acted as regent of the Holy Roman Empire during the minority of her son Henry IV.

The official basis for objecting to this marriage was that the bride's and groom's maternal great-grandmothers were half-sisters, so that Henry and Agnes were third cousins. Moreover, on Henry's father's side they were also fourth cousins once removed. This is illustrated in the following genealogy from Michel Parisse (2004).


Note that Henry III appears twice, once as the son of his father and once as the son of his mother, thus simplifying the network to a tree; this is a point that I have commented on before.

The person formally objecting to this marriage was Siegried of Gorze, who researched the family history and drew the first version of the pedigree. As discussed by Bouchard (2001):
Abbot Siegried of the reformed monastery at Gorze wrote very shortly before [the marriage] to his friend Abbot Poppo of Stablo [or Stavelot], who possessed the confidence and respect of Henry, urging him even at the eleventh hour, and at risk of a possible loss of the king's favor, to do all that he possibly could to prevent it. Neither Poppo, nor Bishop Bruno of Toul (later Pope Leo IX), to whom Siegfried addresses still more severe reproaches, nor Henry himself, paid much heed to these representations.
Henry apparently rebutted Siegried's claim by (falsely) claiming that the pedigree was at fault (ie. the great-grandmothers were not half-sisters). Nevertheless, various published versions of Siegfried's pedigree continued to appear over the subsequent 500 years (see Gädeke 1992). You can read Siegfried's original Latin letters (without the accompanying family tree) in the paper by Michel Parisse (2004). Jean-Baptiste Piggin has a transcription of the genealogy, taken from an early 11th century book (see the blog post: Two medieval drawings).

Part of the issue here is the change in the church laws relating to consanguinity (the degrees of relationship within which marriage was uncanonical), which had occurred during the first half of the ninth century. At that time, both the number of forbidden degrees was increased, from four to seven, and the method of calculating those degrees was changed. These two changes are illustrated here (from Bumke 1991).


So, the church councils held at Rome (during the first half of the eighth century) forbade marriage only between: siblings; parents and offspring; grandparents with grandchildren; a man and his niece (but not a woman and her nephew!); and first cousins. However, the canonical changes during the subsequent century forbade everything out to sixth cousin. The reasoning behind these extreme changes is not fully understood.

Needless to say, these new laws of consanguinity created an impossible situation when, as Bumke (1991) puts it:
in the course of the tenth and the first half of the eleventh century a small number of royal and princely families, already connected by marriage ties in the past, emerged and ruled most of western and central Europe.
Under the new rules, it would not take long for a restricted group of people to become too closely related to inter-marry at all — royalty could not marry royalty. So, Henry set a precedent for his kin when he managed to bypass the new rules, which the aristocracy were likely to ignore anyway. These rules remained in force until 1215 (the Fourth Lateran Council), when the degrees were reduced again to four, but still counted in the "new" way.

As a final note, this sort of religious interference was not always unsuccessful. For example, in the early 1100s Henry I of England suggested marrying one of his (illegitimate) daughters to William de Warenne (2nd Earl of Surrey), but was dissuaded by Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, who pointed out the prohibited degrees involved. Shortly afterwards, Bishop Ivo of Chartres successfully intervened in the proposed marriage of another of Henry's (illegitimate) daughters to Hugh fitz Gervaise of Châteauneuf-en-Thymerais.

References

Constance Brittain Bouchard (2001) Those of My Blood: Constructing Noble Families in Medieval Francia. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.

Joachim Bumke (1991) Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Nora Gädeke (1992) Zeugnisse bildlicher Darstellung der Nachkommenschaft Heinrichs I. Arbeiten zur Fruhmittelalterforschung 22. De Gruyter, Berlin.

Michel Parisse (2004) Sigefroid, abbé de Gorze, et le mariage du roi Henri III avec Agnès de Poitou (1043). Un aspect de la réforme lotharingienne. Revue du Nord 356-357: 543-566.

Karl Schmid (1994) Ein verlorenes Stemma Regum Franciae. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Entstehung und Funktion karolingischer (Bild-)Genealogien in salisch-staufischer Zeit. Frühmittelalterliche Studien 28: 196-225.

The origin of an idea: reducing networks to trees


I have written a number of times in this blog about the strong tendency for people to present reticulating evolutionary relationships as trees rather than as networks. This involves them somehow reducing complex networks to bifurcating trees.

When referring to a "family tree", the most common way to reduce a network to a tree is simply to repeat people's names as often as necessary. That is, rather than have them appear once (representing their birth) with multiple reticulating connections representing their reproductive relationships, they appear repeatedly, once for their birth and once for each relationship, so that there are no reticulations. I presented a number of online examples of this process in my posts on Reducing networks to trees and on Thoroughbred horses and reticulate pedigrees.

Recently, Jean-Baptiste Piggin has pointed out that this approach actually has a very long history, indeed, actually dating back to what seems to be the first pictorial representation of a genealogy.

In an earlier post (The first infographic was a genealogy) I described Piggin's work on what he calls the Great Stemma, a diagram from c. 400 CE (Late Antiquity) representing the genealogy of Jesus as presented in the New Testament. In a recent update, Piggin reports:
The Great Stemma contains 13 doppelganger or fetches, that is to say, simultaneous appearances of the same person in two places, e.g. Hezron [as a] child, and separately as an ancestor of Jesus. This graphic method simplifies the layout, but forced the Late Antiquity reader to mentally register these virtual "hyperlinks".
If you view his diagram of the Great Stemma (Touring the Reconstruction), you can see on an overlay a set of links connecting the multiple appearances of the following people:
Athaliah, Gershon, Hezron, Judah, Kohath, Leah, Levi, Mahalath, Merari, Perez, Rachel, Rebekah, and Timna.

This repetition simplifies what is a rather complex diagram, which actually shows a network of family relationships. There is still one reticulation in the diagram, however, because it depicts Jesus' ancestry as described in the New Testament by both Matthew (labeled Filum C in the schematic below) and Luke (labeled Filum D), and these differ regarding the descendants of David (but not his ancestors).


The diagram contains more than just a genealogy (represented by Filum A-D), as it also displays other references from the Bible (indicated in yellow). Piggin is still working on his reconstruction (there are no known copies of the original, only later hand copies), and he continues to make discoveries.

Of especial interest in the genealogies is that Piggin now reconstructs the Great Stemma as having a strictly grid-like arrangement of the people, as discussed in his blog post Secret of the oldest infographic revealed: a grid. The placements of the lineages in the Stemma, and the connections between the people, are not always obvious to modern eyes (see my post on How confusing were the first written genealogies?), since we are used to the modern version of a "family tree" — it took another millenium after the Stemma to settle on the modern version. However, the use of a regular grid-like arrangement in the Stemma seems surprisingly modern by comparison.


Unfortunately, this arrangement seems to have become corrupted in the subsequent hand-made copies, suggesting that the scribes did not always appreciate the grid's organizational importance.

Drawing family trees as trees


In a previous blog post (Who first drew a family tree as a tree?), I pointed out that one of the candidates for drawing the first family tree as a tree (as opposed to a stick diagram) is Giovanni Boccaccio, in his Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles) of 1370 CE.

However, there are arguments against this attribution. For example, Boccaccio's original pedigree was: (1) not about real people; (2) more like a vine rather than a tree; and (3) not rooted at the bottom. The first version of his pedigree that was actually tree-like and rooted at the bottom was in the Italian translation from 1547 CE (and again in the 1554 edition).

Recently, Jean-Baptiste Piggin has indicated in his blog that he is looking for the Oldest family tree. He writes:
What I am looking for here is the earliest example of a thing named "family tree" or "albero genealogico" or "Stammbaum" or "arbre de famille" ... these things had unwitting precursors in previous centuries. There were even 12th-century artists who took pre-existing stemmata and flipped them upside down to depict them as trees. But these were experiments or flukes, not genealogical trees as a general cultural phenomenon.
The conscious idea of presenting a complete family line connected by a woody trunk first shows up in southern German woodcuts in the late 15th century ... The tree as a recognizable category of art, a product where artist and customer know what to expect, only shows up later in the sixteenth century. It looks semi-natural, has a bottom root and clearly tiered generations.
In his blog post Piggin mentions various attempts (at drawing pedigrees) between their first known appearance in c. 1000 CE (see The first royal pedigree) and the late 1500s, when Scipione Ammirato (an Italian writer and historian) set up a cottage industry producing family trees for the nobility.


Highlights of the history of tree-like pedigree diagrams, as currently known, include (with links to copies of the diagrams):

1370 Boccaccio – first pedigree drawn as a vine, with the root at the top
1475 Rodericus (Der Spiegel des Menschlichen Lebens) – multiple intertwining vines
1492 Conrad Bote (Cronecken der Sassen) – first tree, using family shields in place of names
1515 Albrecht Dürer (Ehrenpforte, engraving) – unbranched woody vine
1536 Robert Peril (Family Tree of the House of Habsburg, engraving) – tree, with people along the trunk only, not on the branches
1547 Boccaccio – first version of his pedigree drawn as a tree
1576 Scipione Ammirato – first of his trees, with people along the trunk as well as the branches. Ammirato's first tree is shown above.

The 12th century pedigree that Piggin refers to, and dismisses as a candidate for a real tree, is discussed in his blog post on the Erlangen tree. This pedigree is from one of the copies of the Ekkehardi Chronicon Universale (Chronicle of Ekkehard of Aura, or Chronicle of Frutolf), drawn in c. 1140. The pedigree itself is based on the one shown in my post on The first royal pedigree, except that Cunigunde of Luxembourg (the focus of that earlier pedigree) is strangely absent. The version of interest is shown below, from the Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg (manuscript 406, referred to as the Erlangen Codex, page 204v).


What is unique about this version of the pedigree is that it has been turned upside down, so that the root is at the bottom, making it look more tree-like. (See also my post on Does it matter which way up a tree is drawn?) As Piggin notes (NB: he uses the word "stemma" to refer to the early versions of pedigrees, with the names in roundels, connected by lines):
Other manuscripts of the Ekkehard Chronicle present the Stemma of Cunigunde more or less faithfully, but the scribe-artist of the Erlangen codex decided to have some fun with it. He inverted it, and drew the figure of Arnulph at the left and Arnulph's saintly mother Begga at right. [Arnulf is the person named at the root of the pedigree.]
What change in medieval culture had made this startling inversion of the stemma not just possible, but acceptable to the customer, probably the Cistercian Monastery of Heilsbronn in Germany, which became the long-term owner of this codex? Is this quirky conversion on an artist's desk the precise moment when the family tree, later to become a prestigious badge of nobility, was invented?
As I have already pointed out, inverted stemmata made to resemble trees with roots in soil are a rarity before the 16th century. It was 16th-century scholars like Scipione Ammirato who deserve the credit as the true originators of the family tree, not the medieval artists who created trees of ancestry more or less by fluke.

Grape genealogies are networks, not trees


I have noted before that the genealogies for all domesticated organisms are networks not trees, and specifically they are hybridization networks. That is, in sexually reproducing species, every offspring is the hybrid of two parents. If we include both parents in the pedigree, plus all of their relatives, then this will form a complex network every time inbreeding occurs.

I have previously illustrated this phenomenon using genealogies of grape cultivars:
     Are phylogenetic trees useful for domesticated organisms?
     First-degree relationships and partly directed networks

Reconstructing grape genealogies is often a tricky business. This was originally done using phenotypic characters and historical records, of course, but these days we use DNA from whatever cultivars are available for sampling. Perhaps the biggest problem is that many of the cultivars are no longer known (there have been at least 10,000 of them recorded at some time in history), so that the genealogies are full of question marks representing unknown (unsampled) parents.

The practical consequence of this is that the time direction of the genealogy will be ambiguous whenever there is a missing parent. Estimates of identity-by-descent (IBD) are calculated based on linkage analysis for all pairwise comparisons of samples, and complex crossing schemes can generate IBD values that are indistinguishable from sibling relationships. So, in these cases we cannot distinguish parent-offspring relationships from sibling relationships.

A simple example is shown in the most detailed current book on grape cultivars:
Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding, José Vouillamoz (2012) Wine Grapes: a Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, including their Origins and Flavours. Allen Lane / Ecco.
This example involves the grand-parentage of the Shiraz grape, usually called Syrah in the effete monarchies of the Old World. The authors present three possible scenarios, as shown here.


There are five sampled cultivars and two inferred unknowns, arranged in an unrooted network. Because the unknowns are inferred to be parents, the network can be rooted in any of three different places, as shown by the three Options illustrated.

The authors (or, more specifically, the third author, who is the one responsible for the genealogies) are in favour of Option A. This means that Mondeuse Noir and Viognier are Syrah's half-siblings rather than either being the grandparent.

This small genealogy is a tree, but when we move to larger genealogies the network nature of the cultivars should become obvious.

However, the authors resort to a standard subterfuge to hide this fact. This strategy is to show cultivars multiple times in the genealogies, to avoid drawing reticulate raltionships. I have illustrated this approach a couple of times before in this blog:

     Reducing networks to trees
    Thoroughbred horses and reticulate pedigrees

In the following genalogy of the Pinot cultivar, the authors note: "For the sake of clarity, Trebbiano Toscano and Folle Blanche appear twice in the diagram."


Trees reign supreme as simplifications of networks!

Who first drew a family tree as a tree?


The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the English-language expression "Family tree" in the sense of "graph of ancestral relations" is first attested from 1752, in the novel A Genuine Account of the Life and Transactions of Howell ap David Price (which is available in Google Books).

Such pedigree diagrams have a much longer history, of course, but they were not called family trees, nor were they drawn with any particular tree-like imagery (except for the religious Tree of Jesse, pictures of which started appearing in the 10th century). See, for example:
This leaves open the question of who first drew a tree-like family tree.


Ernest H. Wilkins (1925. The genealogy of the genealogical trees of the Genealogia deorum. Modern Philology 23: 61-65) has suggested that it might be the Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), in his Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles).

This Renaissance book was an "encyclopedic compilation of the tangled family relationships of the classical pantheons of Ancient Greece and Rome" (according to Wikipedia). It was written in Latin, apparently starting in c. 1350, and then continuously corrected and revised until the author's death. In c. 1370 an apograph [ie. perfect copy] was made of an autograph manuscript [ie. in the author's own hand], and from that first apograph other copies were made.

The 1370 autograph is not known to still exist; but a second autograph manuscript, showing later revisions, is in the Laurentian Library in Florence (MS. LII, 9). There are some three dozen extant apographs from the 1300s and 1400s, all based on the lost first autograph. The first printed edition was produced in Venice in 1472, followed by an edition of 1473 printed in Leuven. At least seven other editions appeared during the 1400s and 1500s. A French translation was published in Paris in 1498, and an Italian translation appeared in Venice in 1547. (See Ernest H. Wilkins. 1919. The genealogy of the editions of the Genealogia Deorum. Modern Philology 17: 425-438.)

The illustrations shown here are from various versions of the book.


Wilkins (1925) notes:
The extant autograph manuscript of the Genealogia Deorum of Boccaccio is illustrated by thirteen genealogical trees, designed certainly and drawn in all probability by Boccaccio himself. At the top of each tree is a large circle, in which is written the name of a divinity. From this circle descends a stem which now expands into other lesser circles, now sends forth leaves, and now branches, which in their turn expand into circles and send forth leaves and lesser branches. In the center of each circle or leaf a name is written. The circles are used for those divinities whose progeny is represented in the same tree; the leaves, for divinities whose progeny is not represented. In the circles the words qui genuit [ie. who fathered] follow each masculine name, and the words quae peperit [ie. who bore] each feminine name. Similar trees certainly appeared in the earlier lost autograph, from which all the apograph manuscripts are derived; and similar trees appear in several apographs, and in the fourth and all later editions of the Genealogia.
So far as I can ascertain, Boccaccio's trees are the earliest secular genealogical trees properly so called: that is to say, the first non-biblical genealogical charts in which stems, branches, and leaves appear.


This claim of priority has apparently gone unchallenged by later workers; eg. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (1991. The genesis of the family tree. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 4: 105-129) notes:
It may well be that Boccaccio was the first to combine the old graphic system of medallions in the descending order typical of medieval genealogies with the implications of a vegetal theme.


The vegetal image is quite obvious, although the leaves do vary widely in form within any one manuscript, and also from copy to copy. In the autograph they are palmately five-lobed. In some trees the different generations are indicated by variation in the colour of the branches.

Personally, to me each of these diagrams looks more like a vine than a tree, especially with the root at the top.

Moreover, some of the printed editions do not contain the genealogies, and in others their form is modified. For example, some have a portrait of the progenitor divinity, and others bear scrolls or circles instead of leaves. Some of the trees have extra (empty) leaves or scrolls. It is thus quite clear that the tree metaphor for the pedigrees was not seen as important at the time.


Nevertheless, it is important to note that in the first two editions of the Italian translation by Giuseppe Betussi (1547 & 1554; but not in later editions) the first genealogy is drawn as an actual tree rooted in the ground, with the name of the progenitor appearing at the base of the trunk. Klapisch-Zuber notes:
In comparison with Boccaccio's divinely radiant foliage, this image must strike us as mean and desiccated. And yet, it is the triumph of the genealogical tree as we know it, planted right side up; and any one in the modern world can use it to evoke his ancestors and to express his faith in the survival of his lineage.

The phylogeny of elves and other fantastic figures


I have previously pointed out that phylogeny reconstructions exits for legendary figures, cartoon animals, Donald Duck, Pokémon, and dragons (see Faux phylogenies). Another popular topic has been the figures of fantastical literature such as elves, dwarves, goblins, gnomes and trolls. Here I present a few of the better-known ones from around the web.

Elves

The first one comes from Dominic Evangelista's blog post at The Eco Tome called Phylogeny of elves finds that santa’s workers are actually dwarves. The original data matrix is provided, but the comments on that post point out a few errors in the character coding.


Dungeons & Dragons Elves

This next one comes from Limey Boy's blog, and specifically pertains to the D&D Elven Phylogenetic Genealogical Tree.



There is a related post on the D&D Human Phylogenetic Genealogical Tree, with a much more extensive genealogy.

Fairyland

Next we have a small tree from Terry Newman covering The Natural History of Fairyland.


Fantasy Races

Then we have a somewhat bigger tree from Reddit covering the Evolutionary Phylogeny of Fantasy Races. This seems to have multiple roots, unlike the other genealogies above.


Lord of the Rings

Finally, we have the genealogy to end all fantasy genealogies. The Lord of the Rings Project has a complete interactive genealogy of all of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is way too large to show here, even in miniature, and is actually a series of genealogies that are not connected. However, it is worth noting that, unlike the above genealogies, while most of the genealogies are tree-like many are actually networks because both sexes are included.

Wigwag, and the Family Tree


I have noted before that common usage of expressions like "family tree" often extend far beyond actual pedigrees. This particular expression is often used to describe any sort of historical relationship, not just genealogical ones. It is also sometimes used simply to describe any sort of personal inter-connection. All of these usages occurred in a short-lived magazine from 25 years ago called Wigwag.


Wigwag magazine formally debuted in October 1989 (after a test issue in 1988), and published its last issue in February 1991, for a total of 15 issues. It was a sort of cozy version of the New Yorker magazine. Similarly, it had a number of regular features, such as the Road Trip, the Map, and Letters From Home. The one that is of interest to us was called The Family Tree.

This feature mapped cultural relationships, having been described as "a field guide to the genealogy of influence in American life". It included human relationships, but it also included things like cars (the tree of which is reproduced in the book by Nobuhiro Minaka & Kunihiko Sugiyama. 2012. Phylogeny Mandala: Chain, Tree, and Network) and comic-book superheroes.

I have been unable to locate any decent copies, but four of the "trees" are included below.

As you can see, sometimes The Family Tree was actually a genealogical tree, but just as often it was simply a network of pairwise cultural connections. The latter, of course, usually formed a complex network that did not really map historical relationships.





This last Family Tree is from the original trial issue, and shows the inter-relationships of the writers and producers of American TV sitcoms.

You can read a bit more about the magazine, and its history, here: