From Britain’s Guardian:
Charles Darwin’s “tree of life”, which shows how species are related through evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists.
The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of an imaginary tree in 1837, an idea that quickly came to symbolise the theory of evolution by natural selection.
But modern genetics has revealed that representing evolutionary history as a tree is misleading, with scientists saying a more realistic way to represent the origins and inter-relatedness of species would be an impenetrable thicket. Darwin himself also wrote about evolution and ecosystems as a “tangled bank”.
“We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,” Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, told New Scientist magazine.
In 2009. Can readers name other fields where these things could have been said five years ago, and it made almost no difference to the protected status of the field?
Follow UD News at Twitter!