Tag: Tree of Life
More Troubles in the Tree of Animal Life
In late 2005, three biologists published a study in Science which concluded, “Despite the amount of data and breadth of taxa analyzed, relationships among most [animal] phyla remained unresolved.” In 2008, the relationships among animals are still controversial. A recent news release at Science Daily highlights a new study, “Tree Of Animal Life Has Branches Rearranged.” The story reports, “The study is the most comprehensive animal phylogenomic research project to date, involving 40 million base pairs of new DNA data taken from 29 animal species.” According to the article, the study yielded surprising results: “Comb jellyfish — common and extremely fragile jellies with well-developed tissues — appear to have diverged from other animals even before the lowly sponge, which has Read More ›
Peter Atkins Dramatically Overstates the Evidence for Evolutionary Phylogenies
I recently picked up Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science by Oxford chemist Peter Atkins. It’s a 2003 book, and on the plus side, it offers enjoyable and concise explanations of many important scientific theories, including some lucid diagrams explaining Einstein’s ideas about relativity. In his chapter on evolution, Atkins boldly states, “The effective prediction is that the details of molecular evolution must be consistent with those of macroscopic evolution.” (pg. 16) I’m willing to accept that “prediction.” However, Atkins unfortunately goes on to dramatically overstate the evidence for molecular evolution by asserting, “That is found to be the case: there is not a single instance of the molecular traces of change being inconsistent with our observations of Read More ›
If the Tree of Life falls, will Darwinists hear it?
A recent article entitled “Scientists say Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’ [TOL] not the theory of everything,” published on Physorg.com, explained that increasingly, “a minority of biologists and evolutionists have questioned the accuracy of the TOL hypothesis.” The basic problem is that similar genes appear in organisms in patterns which do not fit a universal “tree.” As one of the scientists quoted, W. F. Doolittle, elsewhere stated: “Molecular phylogenists will have failed to find the ‘true tree,’ not because their methods are inadequate or because they have chosen the wrong genes, but because the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree.” Doolittle attributes his observations to gene-swapping among microorganisms at the base of the TOL, and tries to Read More ›