Given my own interests in organismal biology, I’ve often been tempted to think about Christianity as a phylogenetic tree, where Jews are an outgroup, the early groups later deemed heresies (docetists, Arians, Ebionites, Gnostic Christians, and so forth) are stem-group basal groups, and all the Christian groups still extant today (Assyrian Christians, Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism) are crown-group Christians.  Is this a fair or useful way to think about this?