He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh:
the Lord shall have them in derision.
Psalm 2:4
"In June 2022, the University of Bath (UK) issued a press release from Professor Matthew Wills and colleagues, provocatively titled, “Study suggests that most of our evolutionary trees could be wrong”.
Over the last 20 years, evolutionary biologists have increasingly had to face the uncomfortable fact that the data of molecular biology often contradict traditional evolutionary family trees.
It is well known that the major way in which evolutionists have grouped living creatures has been according to their anatomical similarities. This, in turn, feeds into arguments about homology. Evolutionary scientists usually start with the assumption that ‘homology is similarity due to common ancestry’. That’s their
definition, but it is problematic when they then point to anatomical similarities and argue that these are evidence for common ancestry. Such arguments for homology are blatantly circular (thus are explanation-free) because they are attempts to prove what had already been assumed!
At the heart of the argument of homology is the idea that similarity of morphology confirms relatedness, but conflicting molecular comparisons among animals are like a spanner in the works. For example, according to research published in 2004, a morphological family tree of mammals has the Xenarthra (creatures like sloths, anteaters, and armadillos) as a very ‘early’ branch of the placental mammals. However, a molecular family tree of the same creatures positions the Xenarthra as having evolved ‘much later’, after a group called the ‘Afrotheria’—which includes elephants, tenrecs, golden moles, elephant shrews, hyraxes, aardvarks, and sea cows.
If this isn’t striking enough, the latest findings of the Bath research team take things to another level. As well as analyzing the evolutionary trees of 48 groups of animals and plants (comparing morphological family trees with molecular trees), Matthew Wills and colleagues also cross-referenced the data to each creature’s geographical location. Nobody had done this before. To their great surprise, “animals grouped together by molecular trees lived more closely together geographically than the animals grouped using the morphological trees”, leading Prof Wills to admit:
Professor Wills re-emphasized this evolutionary dilemma more recently, once again highlighting his team’s counterintuitive study findings:
In other words, such research upsets evolutionary family trees across the board."
At the heart of the argument of homology is the idea that similarity of morphology confirms relatedness, but conflicting molecular comparisons among animals are like a spanner in the works. For example, according to research published in 2004, a morphological family tree of mammals has the Xenarthra (creatures like sloths, anteaters, and armadillos) as a very ‘early’ branch of the placental mammals. However, a molecular family tree of the same creatures positions the Xenarthra as having evolved ‘much later’, after a group called the ‘Afrotheria’—which includes elephants, tenrecs, golden moles, elephant shrews, hyraxes, aardvarks, and sea cows.
If this isn’t striking enough, the latest findings of the Bath research team take things to another level. As well as analyzing the evolutionary trees of 48 groups of animals and plants (comparing morphological family trees with molecular trees), Matthew Wills and colleagues also cross-referenced the data to each creature’s geographical location. Nobody had done this before. To their great surprise, “animals grouped together by molecular trees lived more closely together geographically than the animals grouped using the morphological trees”, leading Prof Wills to admit:
“… it turns out that we’ve got lots of our evolutionary trees wrong. For over a hundred years, we’ve been classifying organisms according to how they look and are put together anatomically, but molecular data often tells us a rather different story.”
Professor Wills re-emphasized this evolutionary dilemma more recently, once again highlighting his team’s counterintuitive study findings:
“Evolutionary trees based on DNA data were two-thirds more likely to match with the location of the species compared with traditional evolution maps. In other words, previous trees showed several species were related based on appearance. Our research showed they were far less likely to live near each other compared to species linked by DNA data.”
In other words, such research upsets evolutionary family trees across the board."
CMI