Travelers
The tree of evolution is gigantic. How do we work with it? We choose a place to start, and travel along the edges from there.
There are two distinct ways of traveling that may show us the process of evolution of matter from different perspectives.
We can choose some place and just walk around. This is what biologists do. They choose some organism and follow it. Mutation happened? We go that way. New environment? Turn over there! Predators ate your test subject? Ouch. Next one!
We may see increasing complexity or decreasing one. We can walk in circles. We observe minor mutations, gradual changes, and collect data with great precision.
We can study non-living systems in the same way. And produce never-ending debates about the borders between life and not life. Technically, the biological evolution, as we know it, is a special case. There are identical processes in different fields. We just may have a personal interest in this one.
Alternatively, we can travel from the center in a straight line. We'll have a constantly increasing complexity, evolution in a general sense, but no good subjects to follow. It's more like a theoretical travel across our data.
Subatomic particles. Self-replication. Single-celled organisms. Don't forget the big things. Stars. Planets. Ocean here. Volcano there. We get ecosystems. Predators eat prey. Machines collect data. And, eventually, we meet an alien civilization with nuclear reactors, space rockets, holy wars, and toilet humor.
This process is the same travel across the same tree, as with biological evolution. We fly at the speed of light in one direction, instead of passively orbiting around some particular subject, but we look at the same universe.
Since we have to travel fast to cover everything, we lose precision. We don't see species-specific details, but get the opportunity to study the universal patterns instead.
Major physical limitations. Logic. Energy conversion cycles. Inevitable structural parts in various systems. Invariants in behavior. Predefined sets of diseases. The longer you look, the weirder it gets. Patterns are literally everywhere.
There is no right or wrong here. Both ways of traveling have their roles in the development of the theory of everything. We need both the big picture and the fine details. Our knowledge is an organism in the same tree at the end. Combine it. Mutate it. Just don't lead it to extinction.