Category: Tree of life

Andre asks an excellent question regarding DNA as a part of an in-cell irreducibly complex communication system

Newbie commenter Andre, in an exchange with Mr Matzke, asks some interesting questions concerning DNA. First, let us remind ourselves of what we are discussing, courtesy NIH: Next, Andre’s comment: DNA has the following; 1. Functional Information 2. Encoder 3. Error correction [4]. Decoder . . . can you please show me in a step… more

One wonders what the next Tree of Life will look like …

We can tell that a field is in ferment when its visuals alter dramatically. more

Nature (journal): “Tearing apart” the traditional animal family tree

When this stuff is appearing in Nature on as regular basis, you know things are changing. more

Darwinists used to think the tree of life had to make sense, but they take a pill for that now

” … young biologists may be unaware that they are inheriting a version of Darwinism that would have been considered quite peculiar only a generation ago.” more

Reptile’s chewing habits raise doubts about reptile-mammal differences

Save yourself useless mental work; just disbelieve everything you hear about Darwin’s Tree of Life. more

Phylogenies without fossils, and the trouble with topology

” … it is necessary to discriminate between those that occur as a result of contemporaneous changes in diversification rates versus tree asymmetries that occur through extinction-driven loss of phylogenetic history. ” more

Scholar: Darwin did not invent the Tree of Life. He never called his diagram that

The concept was commonly used for centuries to represent order in nature, but it is dying.  Except in school, where your kid is forced to learn it. From Nathalie Gontier’s “Depicting the Tree of Life: the Philosophical and Historical Roots of Evolutionary Tree Diagrams” (Evolution: Education and Outreach, 19 August, 2011 ), we learn, It… more

He doubted Darwin’s tree of life, but he was just a creationist. Then …

A topic that (in 1997) was largely the province of one lonely ID philosopher of biology, namely, How would we know if the theory of universal common descent were false? began to bubble away in the literature. Carl Woese published his broadside “The universal ancestor” in PNAS in 1998, saying there never was such an… more