Charles Darwin's tree of life, which shows how species are related, is " wrong" and "misleading", claim scientists.It has taken 150 years for a news story to reflect what ID and Creation scientists have been saying for decades. Darwin's tree is dead. The UK Telegraph reported this today.
Charles Darwin's tree of life, which shows how species are related, is " wrong" and "misleading", claim scientists.Last Updated: 10:01AM GMT 22 Jan 2009I think the next change in scientific text books is a section about the controversy of life from non life. As more information is discovered, the complexity of life is more revealing. ID scientists have no fears of future discoveries. Only much interest.
Dr Rose said: "The tree of life is being politely buried – we all know that. What's less accepted is our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change."
He says biology is vastly more complex than we thought and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.
Dr Bapteste said: "The tree of life was useful. It helped us to understand evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution it's time to move on."
Darwin's model is no stranger to controversy. It has played a key role in the much larger debate with creationists who are convinced life on Earth is so complex it could only have come about from intelligent design – in other words, the hand of God.
1 comment:
Both your heading and the Telegraph article are themselves misleading.
Nowhere in the Telegraph article do any of the contributing scientists say the tree of life is completely wrong or even simply wrong; only that it is more complex than Darwin could even imagine.
Not surprising when Darwin was studying and writing his theory long before genetics or DNA was even a twinkle in anyones eye (there's that complex eye thing again).
As an analogy, the tree of life, is a very good one, considering, the knowledge and understanding on which it had to grow.
The real beauty of the scientific approach to evolution is that it can be updated and modified as understanding and knowledge itself grows.
Far from giving any succour to ID 'scientists' it only expands our knowledge and supports the theory of natural selection being the driving force of biological diversity of all life on earth and probably everywhere life is to be found.
What evolution by natural selection does show is that it is unnecessary to postulate the existence of a god or other super being or power to explain the diversity and beauty of life and the natural world we see all around us.
Sad that truth and knowledge can be so easily side-stepped for the sake of dogma.
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