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Tree of life

At Nautilus: The Ancient Wisdom Stored in Trees

What very old trees can teach us about life, death, and time. Jared Farmer writes: What’s the oldest known living thing, and how do we know? Why should we even want to know? The explanation is a history of curiosity and care. It’s about our long-term relationships—spiritual and scientific—with long-lived plants, as long as long can be. It’s all about trees. A tree is a plant that people call a tree—a term of dignity, not botany. Although people construct the meaning of “trees” and assign age value to the vascular plants they call “ancient trees,” people cannot themselves create life that grows in place for centuries. Exclusively, solar-powered organisms enact that miracle. Among plants, there are ephemerals, annuals, biennials, perennials—and, Read More ›

As evolutionary biologists slowly kill off Darwinism… hacking down the Tree of Life, even…

Species merging. Julie Berwald: What I didn’t know then was that, even as I ambivalently placed the overhead film on the projector, the concept of the tree of life had begun to wilt. Four decades on, it’s morphed entirely. Read More ›

Darwin’s tree of life is just… ground cover?

"Charles Darwin himself predicted that countless intermediate animal forms must exist within the fossil record, given that organisms gradually evolved from one species into the next. However, what the fossil record actually shows is the exact opposite, namely, that whenever new species appear, they do so suddenly and without evidence of precursory forms in the geological record." Read More ›

Dawkins’s claim: “every gene delivers approximately the same tree of life” contested at Nature Portfolio Ecology & Evolution

You know, Dawkins may be losing his shine. New Scientist was making similar types of noise last October. It's now okay to say when there's something wrong with this stuff. Read More ›

Darwin’s notebooks apparently stolen – But wait!

A proper Darwinian response would say that the books evolved away from the Library “daily and hourly” during those twenty years. Seriously, we sure hope they get them back. Read More ›

Newly discovered lizard skull is “perplexing” Its place in Tree of Life uncertain

So the “tree of life” is now a “forest of possibilities.” Researcher: The case of where exactly to put the perplexing lizard highlights an important lesson for paleontologists: just because a specimen fits in one place doesn't mean that it won't fit equally well into another. Read More ›

Poor, Poor Darwinists!

A new study is out trying to find the LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Needless to say, things got even worse for those who place their belief in Darwinian thinking. Because the Concluding Remarks section is so devastating, I’m blockquoting the whole thing: Our work furnishes a new variable for the assessment of protein family evolution which compliments previous approaches based on conserved presence and phylogenetic topology. Using phylogenetic tree based approaches of the type used here, only limited information can be gained about the LUCA, leaving specific details on physiology largely speculative. Analysis of proteins such as the reverse gyrase, hydrogenase, and nitrogenase discussed here and elsewhere (Boyd et al., 2011a, b; Catchpole and Forterre, 2019) does not support Read More ›

At Nature: Evolutionary trees can’t reveal speciation and extinction rates

New paper poses a serious challenge to the schoolroom Darwin industry. You know, one day, the study of evolution might be interesting, like the study of history. Prying the Darwin lobby and its propaganda loose from positions of power is a necessary first step. Read More ›