Hillis's tree included only a sampling of life's diversity, which has been estimated at 10 million to 100 million species.
It is as if Vermeer put a small sample of life under the microscope, just as his neighbor, Leeuwenhoek, did in his revolutionary observations of protozoa.
The easiest way to settle the matter is to find a second sample of life, one that arose from scratch independent of known life.
"This summer, I'm planning on attending one of the Sutton Trust summer schools" [the schemes designed to give bright students from non-privileged homes a sample of life at leading universities like Bristol, Nottingham and Cambridge], says Sam, who is 17 and a student at JFS, a mixed comprehensive in Harrow, London.
"While the idea that there is some critical level of income beyond which income no longer impacts well-being is intuitively appealing, it is at odds with the data," they wrote of their sample of life satisfaction and happiness data across 131 countries.
Owing to the fact that the most important observation errors will arise from inadequate sampling of life stages with the highest elasticities [44], the value (in this case) of sampling in proportion to the SSD is clear.
There were frills on view, but much of it consisted of two young Americans journeying across the "Infected Zone" — a portion of Mexico where a probe, sent into space by NASA to collect samples of alien life, had crashed.
Off the coast of California, nearly 20,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, scientists from the San Diego Institute of Oceaneography are collecting samples of marine life from the ocean floor.
There is a description for each of the objects, which were collected from captured insects; from samples of ocean life, like tubeworms and coral; and even from mold growing on some Romano cheese in Ms. Carvalho's refrigerator.
