UNENDING DIVERSIY T-SHIRT

This is the first of several T-Shirts that are being designed to help increase the understanding of Evolution.

All the animals (monarch butterfly, tiger, ram cichlid fish, red-eyed tree (leaf) frog, and blue and yellow macaw parrot) and fungus (Hygrocybe miniata) on the T-shirt, as well as the one plant (butternut hickory branch), are eukaryotic creatures. Eukaryotic species diversification began from the first eukaryote.

The T-shirt design also includes a double helix, the form in which all genes are found. The language of the genetic code, or a close derivate of it, is used by all of Earth’s life and is just one proof that all life on Earth evolved from a single species, or a pool of genes shared by different organisms.

The words UNENDING DIVERSITY capture the essence of EVOLUTION; an unending process that has allowed and continues to allow organisms to adapt to their local environment and create the estimated 20 billion creatures that have shared and the 4 to 6 million species that continue to share this earth with us. What better explanation then Charles Darwin’s often quoted last sentence in his Origin of Species, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

This T-shirt captures this beauty and wonder: the mind-boggling migration of the beautiful monarch butterfly; the power of the tiger and its representation of the role of predators in keeping ecosystems viable; the ram cichlid fish as a member of one of the most successful diversified groups of complex organisms ever to exist; the red-eyed

tree frog as representative of perhaps the animal whose voice was the first sound heard on land, and whose life cycle rivals that of the monarch; the beautiful blue and yellow macaw, whose ancestors descended from the dinosaurs; the butternut hickory tree whose ability, along with other green plants and certain types of bacteria, to photosynthesize the sun’s energy (something we have still been unable to duplicate) begins not only the first stage in the food chain upon which most of life depends, but provides life-giving oxygen as well; and the fungus, through its role in decomposition begins the nutrient cycle anew. Evolution is “most beautiful and wonderful.”