(July 11, 2014 at 11:25 am)FatAndFaithless Wrote:
Oh hey, I also did some research, and the same scientist (Doolitle) that your article uses to try and 'disprove' evolution, has his own article in Scientific American that asserts the same thing, that evolution is not a 'tree'....but guess what? He then provides a revised model that is much closer to a web or bush, and never once even suggests any weakness in evolution, just the old way of visualizing it.
Here's his suggested new model of bacterial DNA transfer and evolution from a single cell.
Again, it NEVER suggests any sort of weakness or falisty with regards to evolution, and the bullshit sensationalist language in the article you linked, if at all valid, is directed at the former metaphor we used to describe evolution (which was Darwin's idea, you would expect the science to change in its representation over more than a fucking century).
I'm getting tired of you linking shit and then crossing your arms and saying "Ha, disprove that!". It's not our job to deal with every lazy ill-researched claim you make. Do a little damn reading.
Read the caption: "links have been inserted randomly to symbolize the rampant lateral gene transfer...probably arose from a population of primitive cells that differ in their genes"! That does not sound like they have a handle on this. The diagram is describing what they are witnessing.
Later in the article, "Peterson and his team are now going back to mammalian genomes to investigate why DNA and microRNAs give such different evolutionary trajectories. 'What we know at this stage is that we do have a very serious incongruence,' says Davide Pisani, a phylogeneticist at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth". --Dolgin, Elie. 28 June 2012. Rewriting Evolution. Nature, Vol.486, pp.460-462."
I thought linear decent was a hallmark of the evolutionary process.