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Evidence ID: BIO-EV04
Evidence: Lack of Universal Common Ancestral Tree
Summary: The Tree of Life is the quintessential hallmark of the Darwin's theory of evolution. It purports to illustrate a seamless evolution of all living organisms from a single point of origin. While it may illustrate the heritable relationship between species within a phylum, it does not factually illustrate the heritable relationship between species across phyla.
Description: In 1874, Ernst Haeckel artistically rendered Darwin's origin Tree of Life depicting the evolution of man.
What is appealing about this image is that it evokes a sense of simplicity regarding Darwin's theory of the common ancestry of all living things. It instills confidence in evolutionary biology as if to proclaim, "Biologists have finally figured out the evolutionary lineage of man".
This prevailing confidence in evolutionary biology was further reinforced by Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The Greatest Show on Earth.
"We observe the whole pattern of anatomical resemblance throughout all living kingdoms." [REF-DAW01]
So, what is the rationale for such confidence in what Dawkins calls the seamless evolution and remarkable resemblance of all living kingdoms? Given the absence of Precambrian intermediates [BIO-EV01], how do biologists credibly bridge the genetic and anatomical discontinuities between phyla?
Paleontologists have spent the past 160 years studying fossils in search of clues that would enable them to reconstruct the evolutionary history of phyla and species. The process they use to identify this historical Tree of Life is called Phylogenetic Analysis [REF-SCM01].
Phylogenics is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among individual organisms or groups of organisms. The end goal of phylogenetics is to identify, name and classify all living organisms into a taxonomic tree showing the heritable relationships among organisms.
In 2006, the notable molecular biologist Antonis Rokas from Vanderbilt University compared fifty genes across seventeen taxa. He found that deriving a complete and accurate Tree of Life remains an elusive goal even after 160 years since Darwin published Origin of Species [REF-ROK01]. He and his colleagues conclude that there is no genetic relationship between phyla.
"The phylogenetic relationships among most metazoan phyla remain uncertain. We obtained large numbers of gene sequences from metazoans, including key understudied taxa. A 50-gene data matrix does not resolve relationships among most metazoan phyla. Despite the amount of data and breadth of taxa analyzed, relationships among most metazoan phyla remained unresolved." [REF-ROK02]
What Rokas and his team found is that there are no clear links between the genetic composition of each phyla - no transitional intermediates. It is as if phyla are so distinct, they are unrelated. Therefore, they could not have emanated from the single point of origin. They emerged rapidly, without any trace of evolutionary history.
Another approach that is taken to construct the Tree of Live is to compare anatomical features such as body plans and key physical characteristics. This approach also yields results that are inconsistent and inconclusive [REF-WIL02].
Taxonomy requires animals to be classified in only one phylum, but it is unclear from the fossil record how to truly classify some animals that are comprised of traits that span multiple phyla. For example, bats are mammals that fly, and whales are mammals that live underwater. Like bats and whales, many species do not fall exclusively into a single phyla.
While many heritable traits appear within a phylum, there are virtually no heritable traits that appear across phyla. This begs the question. What is the origin of phyla in the course of evolutionary history? Could it be that the formation of phyla was the result of supernatural means, not natural means? This would to be a plausible explanation for the sudden appearance of phyla in the fossil record.
Despite numerous attempts to formulate an accurate, credible, and singular Tree of Life, paleontologists have been unable to formulate a single ancestry devoid of conflicts to account for the origin of phyla.
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