Did anyone, even Charlie D himself, think it was more than one possible metaphor for the process?

[oursin]

How is this news? 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

Comments

trees are old

[auroramama]

First of all, the "tree of life" is much older than Darwin. You don't have to believe in natural selection to notice that sheep and goats are more similar than sheep and eels. The main problem with "tree" is the assumption that there's an up and down axis, and humans are the up. Also much older than Darwin. So one great wave of "it's not a tree" thinking leads to "it's a big bushy ball of seaweed," where the tips are what's still around today, but no particular branch is up.

Second, you need biochemistry to get to the real tangle, where the branching stops being all one-to-many and starts including some many-to-one junctions. There's the deep tangle at the base of the eukaryote tree, where cells in plants, animals, and fungi include (and depend on) their own tame strains of microbes -- that fusion between different kingdoms of life is perhaps a thousand million years old. And there are the amazing little intrusive genes adopted from retroviruses, without which, it's thought, there would be no placental mammals. Which is wonderful, and we're still learning more about it, but it's hardly Darwin's fault that he didn't invent the polymerase chain reaction on top of natural selection.

Um, sorry for the rant. It's just that this kind of journalism is depressing, especially to us USAians with our contingent of "See? Evolution is wrong!" crazies waiting in the wings.

However. The new guy believes in science, so I will be of good cheer.