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Study: “Most of Our Evolutionary Trees Could Be Wrong”

Photo: A round-eared elephant shrew, by Vassil, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

From Phys.org:

Study suggests that most of our evolutionary trees could be wrong

New research led by scientists at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath suggests that determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing anatomy rather than gene sequences is misleading. The study, published in Communications Biology, shows that we often need to overturn centuries of scholarly work that classified living things according to how they look.

In other words: often anatomical similarities are not based on common descent and different lines of evidence (anatomy versus genetics) conflict and thus do not converge on one true tree of life! This refutes one of the favorite talking points of popularizers of Darwinism like Richard Dawkins.