One word represents the last century of science: LIES.
And what's hilarious about all this is the evos on this forum are still pushing the ridiculous, unseen, never-verified or validated biological mechanism that would be represented in the fossil data and confirm Darwin's tree. In otherwords, they're pushing a mechanism that the fossil record does not reflect! It's hilarious...these people are delusional.
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are still pushing the ridiculous, unseen, never-verified or validated biological mechanism that would be represented in the fossil data and confirm Darwin's tree
You mean genetic inheritance? That's as old as Mendel's peas, dude.
One word represents the last century of Creationism: LIES.
And what's hilarious about all this is the fundies on this forum are still pushing the ridiculous, unseen, never-verified or validated Biblical mechanism that would be represented in the fossil data and confirm Creationist lore. In other words, they're pushing a mechanism that the fossil record does not reflect! It's hilarious...these people are delusional.
Fixed.
About the new scientist article he's referring (Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life, 21 January 2009 by Graham Lawton):
I think that he almost managed to read the entire article, but near the end it says:
"We should relax a bit on this," says Doolittle. "We understand evolution pretty well - it's just that it is more complex than Darwin imagined. The tree isn't the only pattern."
So Darwin was wrong, when describing the evolution as a tree. It's more of a net.
And what's hilarious about all this is the evos on this forum are still pushing recognise the ridiculous confirmed, un seen, never well-verified or and validated biological mechanism that would be is represented in the fossil data and confirms Darwin's tree. In otherwords, they're pushing accepting a mechanism that the fossil record does not reflect! It's hilarious...these people are delusional right.
Fixed.
@daMage:
Actually, I think it's New Scientist that is wrong. The existence of horizontal gene transfer has been known about for 50 years and has no real impact on the "tree of life" except where it deals with prokarya. Darwin's original insight of descent with modification, is defensible as long as we have true descent (i.e. parents), in which case HGT is simply another form of "modification".
That I have (for example) a gene from a mosquito in me that arrived inside a parasite some five generations ago does not make a mosquito my great-great-great-grandfather. The line of descent is still clear and tree-like, it is the origin of our genes that is more complex. What this means is that cladistics can't just be the result of genetic comparison. Yes, it's great when the molecular studies confirm the morphological evidence, but such studies were never, and most like will never be, available for most of the fossil record anyway. For most of the tree, morphological phylogeny still rules.
Or, in short:
MORPH O SAYS: HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
image
Hehe... This must be a fake...
To be fair Darwin was the originator of the theory, its been heavily refined and edited to improve it.
@David B.
@everyone else...I'm in agreement with D>B here. Imagine the tree of life as a system of tubes with gene trees diverging inside of them. A gene can be transferred from one species to the other horisontally by making a little wormhole between adjacent or nearly adjacent tubes, sure. But this doesn't alter the prior speciation event that resulted in those two adjacent tubes...it just makes our ability to recover it more difficult.
Its also possible that two tubes come together from time to time to make a new tube, resulting in a hybrid species. This happens all the time in plants. However, its a local phenomenon in the tree of life, which still can be expected to be mostly tree-like.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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