Scientific American has posted a Hominin evolutionary tree, which is interesting, if for no other reason, then for the way they posted it — via the publishers of effortlessly zoomable online documents, issuu.com. The science is fascinating, but I'm more intrigued by this new method of online presentation than by the magazine artist's visual rendering of evolution. Ever notice the way the living Hominins (i.e. you and me) will consistently squash any inconveniently branching structure into a linear one of their choosing, as if that is a good way to sum it up? That is not a good way to sum it up. But it's a pretty good way of summing it down!

Mind you, we can't really be blamed as individuals, since the best way we have available to represent branching data is through interactivity, and we just don't seem comfortable yet as a species reading interactively. 'But but but,' you're probably thinking. Yes, branching commonly occurs between articles on the web, but not within them. We have timidly restricted our range of choice to what to experience rather than how, in a sort of faux-futuristic smorgasbord of prehistoric cuisine. World-flattening conventionalism is the reason this planet's imagination seems thus far doomed to strain the multivariate bolus of inter-causal events that is the Universe and Everything, into the shallow, unitary stream we actually live by.

Ever wonder why, no matter how many times you play your favourite simulated game world, it always tends to collapse into the same general storyline as the previous run? It's that old branch-blindness at play. It's as if we think that multiple outcomes cannot hold meaning, and so in order to communicate we must play the reductionists. Where I come from, this is not the case (or cases, as it were) — just the opposite. Compare the upper and lower halves of this evolutionary spread, for example. They simply aren't saying the same thing. Not even close.