0 a drawing that shows the relationships between the different members of a family, especially over a long period of time -- семейное древо, родословная
The connexins and their family tree.
If a psychoanalytic approach is to survive, then there must be ways of pruning this family tree, so that the body of theory is strengthened rather than continually branching out.
Lexicostatistics thus produces the familiar bifurcating family tree model of linguistic development, with each pair of languages stemming from an earlier language, as discussed further below.
Thus, some of the innovations that have come to characterize a language or sub-group today may have occurred subsequent to its node on the family tree.
Each node on a language family tree is supposed to represent the starting point of an innovation or set of innovations shared by all the languages below the node.
There is no necessary one-to-one relationship between the history of a language and the history of the people who speak it today, nor between a family tree diagram and migrations.
It is likely that most people (if asked) could provide a crude 'family tree' of their musical tastes.
Figure 5 shows a realistic example, in family tree form with all connecting lines horizontal or vertical.