New Bird Study Demolishes Darwinian Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is a concept Charles Darwin used in his On The Origin of Species (1859) to explain the relationships of all forms of life. Since then, the concept has evolved considerably but has not been discarded. Even a recent study of birds is known as the Early Bird Assembling the Tree-of-Life Research Project.

The five-year bird genome project, conducted by the Field Museum, has extracted DNA samples from all major groups of birds still living today. The study was published in Science on June 27, 2008, with a layman's version in ScienceDaily.

The results of the study were astounding. According to ScienceDaily, "the scientific names of dozens of birds will have to be changed, and biology textbooks and birdwatchers' field guides will have to be revised."  Contrary to what was supposed, falcons, for instance, are not closely related to hawks or eagles. Sushma Reddy, a postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum and one of the three lead authors of the study, said, "appearances can be deceiving. Birds that look or act similar are not necessarily related. .. much of bird classification and conventional wisdom on the evolutionary relationships of birds is wrong."

The Darwinian tree of life was to a large extent based on the premise that species that look alike have to be closely related. Some previous observations have already questioned this view, since as Carl Wieland for instance has pointed out, the now extinct Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was a marsupial but looked like the wolf that is a placential and The Flying Phalanger (Petaurus) living in Australia and New Guinea is a marsupial that looks like the flying squirrel. The Darwinian explanation for this phenomenon is convergent evolution, that is, different species are thought to have evolved the same traits independently. However, this does not seem to be based on facts but the obvious purpose of this view is to preserve the theory of evolution from extinction.

The new avian study suggests that when it comes to birds, the tree of life is on the verge of extinction. It has to be dramatically re-drawn just to keep it alive.

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Comments on this article:

» left by Ben Morrish ⁽⁸⁴²⁾
Ben Morrish (40 days 19 hours ago.)

The fact that groups branches on the tree of life regularly have to be re-ordered is not a weakness of the theory of evolution. The orderings were originally speculative in any case, being the "best guess" based on the available evidence. As more and better evidence comes in, we can make better guesses.

 

The article you refer to demonstrates weaknesses in classification methods. The article makes no implication of anything being wrong with the theory of evolution itself! It doesn't suggest that birds didn't evolve by natural selection, it merely demonstrates that previous speculation on the specific paths of their evolution was wrong.

 

Convergent evolution is strongly supported by facts, and shows why the old classification system (based almost entirely on physical similarities = relatedness) was wrong. Dolphins look a lot like sharks, certainly they resemble sharks a lot more than they resemble humans, yet convergent evolution explains why they resemble sharks (e.g. they share the same environment, and the streamlined shape is well suited to it) YET AREN'T CLOSELY RELATED to them. Dolphins are more closely related to humans than they are related to sharks.

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» left by Joel Kontinen ⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ (40 days 16 hours ago.)

 

Hi Ben,

 One of my favourite phrases in articles or papers dealing with Darwinian evolution is “now we know”, which of course is evo-speak for “sorry folks, but what we have been presenting as fact is but guesses”.

 Evolutionists are not too fond of Occam’s razor in their explanations and often have to prop up their pet theory with ad hoc explanations, such as convergent evolution. Evolution itself is never doubted, since that would amount to sacrilege but just like the Marxist theory of history it is always assumed to be true, regardless of the evidence. No true believer would ever let a Divine foot in the door.

 BTW, sharks are what evolutionists call living fossils. The poor creatures have obviously forgotten to evolve for ages and thus provide no evidence for evolution. And neither do trees of life that have to be redrawn every now and then.

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» left by Ben Morrish ⁽⁸⁴²⁾
Ben Morrish (40 days 14 hours ago.)

Evolution is fact. It is something we observe from nature, like gravity. The *theory of evolution by natural selection* is not an empirical fact, it is a scientific theory that seeks to explain the empirical fact.

Whilst some specific details in science are falsely presented as fact when they are in fact just educated guesses, this does not in any way make the theory collapse - it just shows that people need to be clearer on the certainty of those specific claims.

Convergent evolution is hardly an ad hoc idea, it is the most parsimonious explanation (i.e. the one that Occam's razor would favour) for the empirical fact that creatures that look extremely similar may have extremely different genomes.

Octopus eyes are extremely similar in many ways to human eyes, but there is no evidence that octopuses are closely related to humans - their eyes have evolved independently, but convergently.

What other scientific explanation do we have for the fact that dolphin DNA shows close relationship to elephants and hippos and distant relationship to very similar looking creatures in their environment, like sharks?

No creature can "forget" to evolve because individual creatures do not evolve - evolution is the accumulation of gradual changes in populations of creatures down the generations.

Sharks have changed little over a relatively long period of time because there has been no selective pressure to change - their current form is extremely well suited to their environment, perhaps close to optimal given the mutational possibilities, and thus selection will favour individual sharks who don't exhibit changes.

Until very recently, the "tree of life" was almost entirely educated guesswork, based on the at least partially subjective observed similarities in forms of the organisms.

Now that we have molecular biology, we can make much more precise judgements, thanks to the digital nature of the genes which eliminates most if not all of the subjectivity in estimating similarity.

Of course, we do not have the luxury of complete molecular genetic information for all historical species, so there is still some educated guesswork involved, some of which may turn out to be wrong when better evidence becomes available.

Importantly, even if the evidence did not favour natural selection* as an explanation for the empirical fact of evolution, it would still be the *only* scientific theory currently in existence that can *in principle* explain it.


* the evidence *does* strongly favour it

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» left by Joel Kontinen ⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ (39 days 22 hours ago.)

 

Hi Ben,

You have obviously been very busy lately but unfortunately you have missed at least some of the irony of both my original article and my response to your comment. Of course, we are discussing serious matters, aren’t we, so we should probably keep irony to minimum.

 You used three different definitions of evolution in your two comments. This, of course, is typical of evolutionists. When evolutionists speaks of evolution they often use the word in one of the following senses, “change”, “change over time” or “descend with modification” (the goo-to-you view) and what is confusing, they might even change the meaning in the middle of the sentence. A bit careless, isn’t it? BTW, which definition did you use?

 But, first of all, let’s make it clear that natural selection is not the same thing as evolution. You might know that Charles Darwin adopted this term from the writings of Edward Blyth (1810—1873), a British chemist and zoologist who had written about the concept twenty years before Darwin. Blyth, as you might remember, was a creationist.

 The full title of Darwin’s 1859 book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, which of course is a misnomer since natural selection does not have the capacity to design or create new traits. I’ve read Darwin’s book from cover to cover and was not very impressed with it. Most of it has to do with selective breeding (science) but later on Darwin and his disciples extrapolated the results ad infinitum. Mark Twain put it this way in Life on the Mississippi, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Here is the context:

 In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

 Now, I don’t believe in million of years but I hope you get the point. Natural selection can only select from existing material so evolution also needs mutations that are basically spelling mistakes.

 For evolutionists, there is only one game in town. Anything that smacks of design has to be ruled out a priori. Naturalism is very intolerant of competing theories. Or, as Richard Darwins said, “As a scientist I am pretty hostile to a rival doctrine”. Doctrine is a synonym for the party line, isn’t it? “Evolution is fact” is a doctrine. It has more to do with your worldview than with science. 

 In his recent book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions David Berlinski quotes Robert Carroll who says, “most of the fossil record does not support a strictly gradualistic account” of evolution. Doctor Berlinski adds, “A ‘strictly gradualistic’ account is precisely what Darwin’s theory demands: It is the heart and soul of the theory.” (quote from page 189)

 Later, Dr. Berlinski goes to say, “Although Darwin’s theory is very often compared favorably to the great theories of mathematical physics on the grounds that evolution is as well established as gravity, very few physicists have been heard observing that gravity is as well established as evolution. They know better and are not stupid.” (page 191)

 A much more logical explanation for shared traits is common design, not convergent evolution. When just-so stories masquerade as science, as they so often do in evolution storytelling, we might suspect that there might be something wrong with the theory. Calling it fact will not change the real facts. 

 All the best,

Joel

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