Evolutionary Trees Are All Wrong

We didn’t say it. They did. But how can
we trust what they are saying now?

 

For years, the Darwinian paleoanthropologists who tell stories about human evolution have been telling us that “everything we know is wrong” (e.g., 26 June 2021). Now, some evolutionists are claiming that phylogenetic (evolutionary) trees are all wrong. Get a load of this; is it a late April Fool joke? No. They are dead serious!

Study suggests that most of our evolutionary trees could be wrong (University of Bath, 1 June 2022).

In Tontological fashion, the evolutionists at University of Bath sweep the reader into their own shed of fallacies by stating that most of “our” evolutionary trees “could” be wrong. They should say that most of Darwinists‘ evolutionary trees “are” wrong.

New research led by scientists at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath suggests that determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing anatomy rather than gene sequences is misleading. The study, published in Communications Biology, shows that we often need to overturn centuries of scholarly work that classified living things according to how they look.

The press release says we should trust “molecular studies” instead of comparative anatomy. But how can this be, when the first photo caption says: “Molecular evolutionary trees show that elephant shrews are more closely related to elephants, than they are to shrews.” The option they fail to consider is that all evolutionary trees are wrong.

The evolutionists at University of Bath compared molecular classification with comparative anatomy, and found that the molecular studies fit geographical distribution better. But there’s a problem: the resulting animals look extremely different from one another. One grouping evolutionists call “Afrotheria” (African placental mammals) is a hodgepodge of critters.

“For example, tiny elephant shrews, aardvarks, elephants, golden moles and swimming manatees have all come from the same big branch of mammal evolution – despite the fact that they look completely different from one another (and live in very different ways).“

A Magical Potion

So how can anyone believe the new story? Darwinists have a tried-and-true fix for doubters: “convergent evolution.” It’s an essential ingredient in Darwin Flubber, “a magical elastic substance made of a secret blend of Emergence, Convergence and Submergence” that “allows the Evolutionary Web of Belief to absorb any falsifying blow.” These evolutionists from the University of Bath are bathing evolutionary theory in a tub of Darwin Flubber.

How did powered flight originate 4 times in different animal groups?

The study found that convergent evolution – when a characteristic evolves separately in two genetically unrelated groups of organisms – is much more common than biologists previously thought.

Professor Wills said: “We already have lots of famous examples of convergent evolution, such as flight evolving separately in birds, bats and insects, or complex camera eyes evolving separately in squid and humans.

“But now with molecular data, we can see that convergent evolution happens all the time – things we thought were closely related often turn out to be far apart on the tree of life.

Now They Tell Us

How long have evolutionists been wrong about this?

Dr Jack Oyston, Research Associate and first author of the paper, said: “The idea that biogeography can reflect evolutionary history was a large part of what prompted Darwin to develop his theory of evolution through natural selection, so it’s pretty surprising that it hadn’t really been considered directly as a way of testing the accuracy of evolutionary trees in this way before now.

What? Does this mean that evolutionists have been preaching their dogma for 162 years without testing it? Evolutionists have been building phylogenetic trees for over a century. Almost every paper about a new fossil organism includes a phylogenetic tree. Darwinians use software programs to build trees of relationship. Now they’re telling us they are misleading, inaccurate and wrong?

The Happy Mask

How widespread is the problem? It’s everywhere on the mythical Tree of Life that Darwin built to replace the one in the Bible. How can Darwinists live with themselves? How can they keep their jobs after such a colossal, monumental blunder?

Like broken-hearted clowns wearing a Greek smile mask, these evolutionists have learned a common PR method for avoiding angry responses from the public: Sound excited!

“What’s most exciting is that we find strong statistical proof of molecular trees fitting better not just in groups like Afrotheria, but across the tree of life in birds, reptiles, insects and plants too.

“It being such a widespread pattern makes it much more potentially useful as a general test of different evolutionary trees, but it also shows just how pervasive convergent evolution has been when it comes to misleading us.”

Everything they’ve been saying about Darwinian phylogenetic trees is wrong. We were misled. Now they want us to keep trusting them. They’ll get it right some day in Futureware land.

Source paper: Oyston et al., “Molecular phylogenies map to biogeography better than morphological ones.” Nature Communications Biology, 31 May 2022.

Studies of homoplasy and convergence demonstrate that morphological similarity can sometimes be a poor guide to evolutionary relationships…. While phylogenetic hypotheses derived from morphology are often supported by molecular data, molecules have also overturned many long-standing morphological hypotheses. For example, phylogenomic analyses of placental mammals have drastically altered the sequence of deep branching events traditionally supported by morphology…. Equally, molecular trees often conflict with each other, most notably when they are inferred using different sets of genes.

See also the article by Mike Keas and Paul Nelson, “Troubles with the Tree of Life” at Evolution News 26 May 2022. Their article deals with other admissions of failure in phylogenetic trees by different evolutionists from a variety of institutions.

Their solution is worse than the problem (see Guth Goof). Evolutionists desperately want the public to believe that everything is related by universal common ancestry (key dogma #1 of Darwin), and that the relatedness came about by natural selection (key dogma #2 of Darwin). But now we hear that one cannot trust the appearances of animals or plants to indicate ancestry. So they look to molecular studies, and find apparent relatedness has nothing to do with anatomy. An elephant shrew is more closely related to an elephant than to other shrews! Who can accept that?

They say that the molecular studies in which they now trust correlate better with biogeography, but that’s a phony test, because animals move around. Some animals stay within their general region, but birds, whales, sea turtles, fish and other creatures—even carnivores like bears and lions, and herbivores like wildebeest—migrate long distances. The dinosaurs did, too. Recently evolutionists claim that wood termites migrated to every continent on rafts of wood chips, and the Monkey Rafting Hypothesis proposes that New World Monkeys evolved from the Old World Monkey after rafting across the Atlantic, according to Darwinians. Plants also spread their seeds far and wide, sometimes crossing continents.

Summarizing, both tests of universal common ancestry fail. This requires Darwinians to push more “convergent evolution,” transferring the creative power to produce exquisite designs like powered flight onto the environment. Does air cause bats, birds, insects and pterosaurs to “evolve” flight? How many lucky mutations does that take? How many millions of Darwin Years are required? The whole Darwinian narrative is unraveling, Darwin’s house of cards is falling, and the public had better realize they cannot trust these clowns. Read this quote from the article with shock at the credulity of Darwinists:

“People who make a living as lookalikes aren’t usually related to the celebrity they’re impersonating, and individuals within a family don’t always look similar – it’s the same with evolutionary trees too.

“It proves that evolution just keeps on re-inventing things, coming up with a similar solution each time the problem is encountered in a different branch of the evolutionary tree.

“It means that convergent evolution has been fooling us – even the cleverest evolutionary biologists and anatomists – for over 100 years!”

In a classic stage skit called “The Maskmaker,” pantomime artist Marcel Marceau pretended to be someone finding himself in a prop room of a theater. He sees masks on the shelf and tries them on. Marcel would appear to “put on” the sad mask, then the happy mask, not really wearing any mask but pretending to with his facial expressions. He would switch back and forth rapidly, getting good laughs from the audience. But then something awful happens. The mime “put on” the happy mask and can’t get it off. For the rest of the skit, the mime tries in vain to remove it. Never letting up on his frozen smile of desperation, he tries everything but fails. At last he collapses on stage, smile and all. When he finally peels it off with great effort, his face looks forlorn and miserable with despair. In this ironic and unexpected outcome, the audience is left with an overwhelming sense off tragedy.

Isn’t that just like these evolutionists? They just told us that everything they have been telling us is wrong, but they’re excited. Advice: don’t watch the face; watch the body.

And for an extra dose of irony, compare the science in today’s article with yesterday‘s. Darwinism is dead. Humpty Darwin has fallen. Let’s move on, back to evidence-based research that doesn’t rule out design from the get-go.