[sago]

This is an article from an antievolution, pro-intelligent design, 'science news' website, run by the Discovery Institute. It is promoting a paper from their own journal.

It was not peer-reviewed. And was created and funded based on ideological presuppositions.

Meanwhile in the real-world, it has long been known that the evolutionary tree is a graph. But the degree of lateral gene transfer is typically thought to be small. Even more so for more complex taxa. (Perhaps more common in bacteria, for example).

Please don't confuse this website or paper with science. The author would need to do a lot more work in a very different intellectual context to make it so.

[pushrax]

Thanks for this reply. Since most people (myself included) are not familiar with the state of the art, this article sounds somewhat compelling, given it describes a plausible correction to the prolific idea of evolutionary trees. At least it's immediately clear they are overstating the impact of this work though, given the presentation style and inconsistency. Claiming the graph model and simultaneously dismissing LGT with no further explanation is nonsensical.

[cetico]

Indeed, thanks for clarifying. I apologise for posting pseudo-science in the first place.

(Although a little bit of divergent thinking is healthy for the mind)

[BariumBlue]

Initially looking at the article, it sounded intelligent, talking about measuring the fit of data and a theory. But yup, another article mentions the soul and talks about human exceptionalism.

Still much more advanced than the average creationist who only offers doubt and a supernatural explanation

[sago]

It nicely deferred the giveaway phrase 'intelligent design' until very late. But they call evolutionary biologists 'evolutionists', and find that this new model refutes the whale fossil series (creationists really hate the whale fossil series). And, as always, it is a model without a mechanism. Because they already know the mechanism. God did it.