"How many people have heard that Darwin’s famous branching-tree diagram of universal common ancestry is obsolete?The only diagram in Darwin’s Origin was a more formal representation of a drawing he had made earlier, showing how ancestral forms branched out and diversified over time. Diversification undoubtedly occurs, but Darwin assumed that variation under selection would produce “endless forms most beautiful” of higher complexity.
In Nature, John Archibald has just reviewed David Quammen’s latest book The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018). He titles his review, “The band of biologists who redrew the tree of life.” They didn’t redraw it as much as cut it down:
In The Tangled Tree, celebrated science writer David Quammen tells perhaps the grandest tale in biology: how scientists used gene sequencing to elucidate the evolutionary relationships between living beings. Charles Darwin called it the ‘great Tree of Life’. But as Quammen reveals, at the molecular level, life’s history is more accurately depicted as a network, a tangled web through which organisms have been exchanging genes for more than 3 billion years. This perspective is indeed radical, and he presents the science — and the scientists involved — with patience, candor and flair.
If organisms have been exchanging genes, what happens to the tree of common ancestry? It evaporates. Information sharing is closer akin to intelligent design than evolution. The information was already there; it’s just getting passed around. The vision of a “tree” becomes a phantom, a misrepresentation of reality." CEH
And hath made of one blood all nations of men
for to dwell on all the face of the earth,...
Acts 17:26
