New discoveries are bringing down the whole notion of a "tree of life", as passages from an article in the mainstream magazine New Scientist show:21 "The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin's thinking, equal in importance to natural selection, according to biologist W. Ford Doolittle of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened." "For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the 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 Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. 'We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,' says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change." "The problems began in the early 1990s when it became possible to sequence actual bacterial and archaeal genes". "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". " 'There's promiscuous exchange of genetic information across diverse groups,' says Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine." "As early as 1993, some were proposing that for bacteria and archaea the tree of life was more like a web. In 1999, Doolittle made the provocative claim that 'the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree'.13 'The tree of life is not something that exists in nature, it's a way that humans classify nature,' he says."
"Recent research suggests that the evolution of animals and plants isn't exactly tree-like either." "A team at the University of Texas at Arlington found a peculiar chunk of DNA in the genomes of eight animals - the mouse, rat, bushbaby, little brown bat, tenrec, opossum, anole lizard and African clawed frog - but not in 25 others, including humans, elephants, chickens and fish. This patchy distribution suggests that the sequence must have entered each genome independently by horizontal transfer."29 "HGT [horizontal gene transfer] has been documented in insects, fish and plants, and a few years ago a piece of snake DNA was found in cows." "Biologist Michael Syvanen of the University of California, Davis... compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes. In theory, he should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals. He failed."
"The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories." " 'We've just annihilated the tree of life. It's not a tree any more, it's a different topology [design or shape] entirely,' says Syvanen." "It is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works." "Rose goes even further. 'The tree of life is politely buried, we all know that,' he says. 'What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.' Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says." " 'The tree of life was useful,' says Bapteste. 'It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it's time to move on.' "21
Evolutionists write: "The meaning, role in biology, and support in evidence of the universal 'Tree of Life' (TOL) are currently in dispute. Some evolutionists believe... that we can with available data and methods reconstruct this tree quite accurately, and that we have in fact done so, at least for the major groups of organisms. Other evolutionists... do not doubt that some... branching tree can in principle represent the history of all life. Still other evolutionists, ourselves included, question even this most fundamental belief, that there is a single true tree." "Darwin claimed that a unique inclusively hierarchical pattern of relationships between all organisms based on their similarities and differences was a fact of nature." Yet "the only data sets from which we might construct a universal hierarchy including prokaryotes, the sequences of genes, often disagree and can seldom be proven to agree. Hierarchical structure can always be imposed on or extracted from such data sets by algorithms designed to do so, but at its base the universal TOL rests on an unproven assumption about pattern that, given what we know about process, is unlikely to be broadly true." There is "the possibility that hierarchy is imposed by us rather than already being there in the data."12 "The finding that, on average, only 0.1% to 1% of each genome fits the metaphor of a tree of life overwhelmingly supports the... argument that a single bifurcating tree is an insufficient model to describe the microbial evolutionary process." "When chemists or physicists find that a given null hypothesis can account for only 1% of their data, they immediately start searching for a better hypothesis. Not so with microbial evolution, it seems, which is rather worrying. Could it be that many biologists have their heart set on finding a tree of life, regardless of what the data actually say?"10 "A single, uninterrupted TOL does not exist, although the evolution of large divisions of life for extended time intervals can be adequately described by trees." "Tree topology tends to differ for different genes."21 The genomes of all life forms are collections of genes with diverse evolutionary histories." "The TOL concept must be substantially revised or abandoned because a single tree topology or even congruent topologies of trees for several highly conserved genes cannot possibly represent the history of all or even the majority of the genes." "The 'strong' TOL hypothesis, namely, the existence of a 'species tree' for the entire history of cellular life, is falsified by the results of comparative genomics." "So the TOL becomes a network, or perhaps most appropriately, the Forest of Life that consists of trees, bushes, thickets..., and of course, numerous dead trunks and branches."19
This is huge. Professional evolutionists spend most of their time adjusting their "tree of life". They have fun thinking how one type of creature "developed" into another type, how abilities "arose" or "emerged" here and there, but that is just playing at science. These articles show that, while they still cling to their belief in evolution, the truth is becoming inescapable to a few evolutionists who dare to look at the facts: Darwin was wrong; microbes, insects, plants, and animals do not fit a "tree of life" with linear descent. There is no pattern to their similarities and differences because each one is a uniquely designed, complete creature.
The big fudge
There were warnings of problems in the very "tree of life" diagrams evolutionists were fabricating. If you believed these diagrams of new forms arising from old forms, then you believed that parts can be lost from a creature and then exactly re-invented in the same creature millions of years later. And that might happen several times! Not only that, the same part might appear independently in unrelated creatures. For example, wings would have had to evolve completely independently four times: in insects, flying reptiles, birds, and bats.
 | When a creature produces light with chemicals it is called bioluminescence. "A remarkable diversity of marine animals and microbes are able to produce their own light, and in most of the volume of the ocean, bioluminescence is the primary source of light." "On land, fireflies are the most conspicuous examples, but other luminous taxa include other beetles, insects like flies and springtails, fungi, centipedes and millipedes, a snail, and earthworms." Evolutionists think bioluminescence evolved independently 40 to 50 separate times! --Haddock, Steven H.D., Mark A. Moline, James F. Case. 2010. Bioluminescence in the Sea. Annual Review of Marine Science, Vol. 2, pp. 443-493. |
Instead of heeding the warnings and scrapping the diagrams, they solved the problem by giving it a name: either "convergent" or "parallel" evolution (according to the situation), and it became standard in evolutionist writings. Now they just casually throw out statements like "convergent evolution is widespread across the mammal tree of life". --Helgen, Kristofer M. 28 October 2011. The Mammal Family Tree. Science, Vol. 334, pp. 458-459.
In their sales pitch to the public, evolutionists use the gimmick, "if a million monkeys typed randomly for millions of years, eventually one would type one of Shakespeare's sonnets", and people think "well, maybe...". How about the monkeys typing the same sonnet twice or more? It would be shocking if random mutation-natural selection produced any working part, let alone the same part twice or more from scratch. With convergent/parallel evolution, evolutionists could fudge any situation.
Perhaps the most brazen example of this can be seen in the "parallel evolution" of the two types of mammals, placental (such as humans) and marsupial (such as kangaroos). Evolutionists tell us that each group evolved separately, yet many are remarkably similar, including cats, mice, wolves, moles, flying squirrels, anteaters, and others. This is whole animal duplication, not just an individual part.
A normal person would be embarrassed if their theory of random change made such claims, but you cannot embarrass a fanatic. The only reason for the "convergent/parallel evolution" trick is to force the "tree of life" framework onto a world of uniquely designed creatures.
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