Open Source Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Social sciences Software

Controversial ideas of Williamson, Margulis & others suggest speciation by hybridizing might be more common than originally thought. Taking this concept to the nth degree & assuming that indeed, speciation mostly occurs by hybridizing events, not the accumulation of mutations or genetic drift, here is a catalogueoflife2gedcom converter. It allows the tree of life to be displayed as a human genealogy tree with hybridizing events depicted as "marriages." The idea then is that mutation accrual & genetic drift are the determining factors for "species maturation," not speciation itself. Unfortunately the Catalogue of Life Project, catalogueoflife.org, changed its database format more recently, so this converter only works on older versions of the data. In the last working version of the database, making the assumption that each taxonomic name, no matter what level, refers to an original real species & starting them all as female, over 2 million "species/persons" were generated.

The primary driver of speciation may result from hybridization instead of the accumulation of mutations. The accumulation of mutations may instead be responsible for a "maturation" which may have real physical meaning rather than being an amorphous concept. Scientists such as Donald Williamson and Lynn Margulis have suggested similar ideas but perhaps not going as far as this project assumes. This software converted the Catalogue of Life, catalogueoflife.org, into a gedcom format. It no longer works due to the Catalogue's database format change. This present project extends the gedcom format for use in systematics or species categorization. All named taxonomic levels are assumed to have originally been individual species and the software/database outputs all species as female until hybridization events can be added manually. This tool is used to develop the data at http://genealogyoflife.com. It converted the data from 1.2 million species to over 2 million gedcom females.