Shocking stuff. Having listened to so much 'adoration of the Darwin' in recent months - I had naturally selected much material 'to prove his greatness'. And now this comes along!Can they mean that he wasn't perfect after all? - Just one more dis-proof of his hypotheses out of hundreds.
DARWIN WAS WRONG ABOUT TREE OF LIFE, according to the front cover and feature article in New Scientist, 21 Jan 2009, p34-39. Ever since Darwin drew a spiky diagram of a branching pattern in one of his notebooks, and then included a much neater tree in “On theOrigin of Species,” evolutionary biologists have depicted all life on earth as one great tree beginning from a single cell whichgave rise to several basic multi-cellular body plans, which then divided into more and more specialised organisms. It was a goodmetaphor for the basic tenet of evolution – descent from a common ancestor. Numerous attempts have been made to draw up thedefinitive tree of life that shows where branches occurred, and which species gave rise to others along the branch. However, allhave failed. Genome sequencing which should have been able to show clearly which organisms arose from which, has also failed toproduce a tree-like pattern, but instead has produced a scattered pattern because common genes are found in organisms on widelyseparated branches of the tree, and other genes seem to have disappeared and reappeared as a branch grew. For example: biologistMichael Syvanen of the University of California, Davis, recently compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts,sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes, with the aim of drawing up a tree. It didn’t work. Different genes gave different trees.
Evidence News.
