Darwin was wrong, it is not a tree, rather a web.

OK, been on this site for a while hence my baddie points if not my goodies. However, can't find a serious science section.

New Scientist 24th Jan 2009

www.newscientist.com...

'IN JULY 1837, Charles Darwin had a flash of inspiration. In his study at his house in London, he turned to a new page in his red leather notebook and wrote, "I think". Then he drew a spindly sketch of a tree.'
.....
'"For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded.'
.........
'So what happened? In a nutshell, DNA. The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 opened up new vistas for evolutionary biology. Here, at last, was the very stuff of inheritance into which was surely written the history of life, if only we knew how to decode it.'
......
'The problems began in the early 1990s when it became possible to sequence actual bacterial and archaeal genes rather than just RNA. Everybody expected these DNA sequences to confirm the RNA tree, and sometimes they did but, crucially, sometimes they did not. RNA, for example, might suggest that species A was more closely related to species B than species C, but a tree made from DNA would suggest the reverse.'
.....
'Which was correct? Paradoxically, both - but only if the main premise underpinning Darwin's tree was incorrect. Darwin assumed that descent was exclusively "vertical", with organisms passing traits down to their offspring. But what if species also routinely swapped genetic material with other species, or hybridised with them? Then that neat branching pattern would quickly degenerate into an impenetrable thicket of interrelatedness, with species being closely related in some respects but not others.'
.....
'We now know that this is exactly what happens. As more and more genes were sequenced, it became clear that the patterns of relatedness could only be explained if bacteria and archaea were routinely swapping genetic material with other species - often across huge taxonomic distances - in a process called horizontal gene transfer (HGT).'

How does this impact on the scientific debate between the accuracy of science and assisted design. We now have more possibilities than just genetic mutations, could tides, the moon, the sun, Jupiter, a lonely fish getting infected like a cat et al have a hand in this?

Just a thought.......

[edit on 23/1/2009 by redled]

this adds a whole news creepy level to natural history, but then we've always known that asses are made when donkeys and horses mate

and the zoo near me has a zeedonk, a zebra-donkey hybrid, maybe this is more comman that we knew and all sorts of animals have been cross breeding.

reply to post by NatureBoy


Chances are that that zeedonk cannot reproduce.
When animals with a different number of chromosomes are bred, sometimes they can create offspring that are a mixture of the two. But these offspring, like ligers, often have trouble reproducing. All male ligers are sterile.

Mules, yattles, and other hybrids are often sterile. It cannot, therefore, be very common in nature because the reproduction rate is lower. Sterile animals have no evolutionary purpose unless their genes evolve to become non-sterile, or unless they can reproduce asexually.

The 'Tree' was conceived, fabricated as an easy way to try to describe
the apparent 'structure' of life.


a 'tree' was without doubt a pretty poor anology...let alone a 'Principal'
a 'web' might be in the same category...
because we are trying to 'fit' a linear progression (evolution) as the
firm & concrete model of the diversity of life on planet Earth.


Might not one imagine that a creator ... somehow brought all these
diverse life forms to Earth from other environs...
but Darwin and 'we' see only the limited scope of a series of 'progression'
which we term as a series of evolutionary developments?

A web is graph theoretic and merely needs a third dimension to work. Trees are 2 D, a web needs to weave over and under and can be done in 3D

Of course one couldn't possibly take this evidence and conjecture that the cross species dna sharing is due to design reuse by the creator and not due to pure happenstance.

Yet another reason to doubt the basic premise of evolution.