(September 10, 2019 at 9:53 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: Just as a correction to the above, evolutionary biology doesn’t actually rule out multiple instances of life having arisen, unrelated.
Sadly, I agree. The theory has no issue with assuming abiogenesis occurred multiple times and attributing any lack of common descent to the organisms evolving from multiple lines of common ancestry. We already know it has no problem with organs evolving multiple times and themselves not sharing a common descent (human eye vs octopus I believe).
But none of that really matters, because most of its phylogenetic hypothesis are not verifiable anyway.