 The upshot of widespread HGT is that microbial genes will frequently have different histories, and genetic parts will sometimes flow from one lineage to very distantly related lineages. Microbialists and philosophers of biology have taken up the question of whether reticulation in microbial histories is enough to entirely undercut the utility of phylogenetics in microbial genomics, and how this has impacted the utility of the tree of life metaphor more generally (e.g., Martin 1999; Doolittle 1999; Velasco 2013 see too the special issue of Biology &amp; Philosophy [O’Malley, Martin, &amp; Dupré 2010]).