Analyzing the Ring of Life Molecular biologists have uprooted a traditional perspective on life's ancient ancestry, if their supplanted tree-of-life metaphor is modified to look more like a ring-of-life.    Astrobiology Magazine -- One of science's most popular metaphors - the "tree of life," with its evolutionary branches and roots, showing groups of bacteria on the bottom and multicellular animals on the higher branches - turns out to be a misnomer, UCLA molecular biologists report in the Sept...