from tree to web?

Hi!At my working place i'm confronted with some kind of muslim creationist colleague, on a daily basis. This person will not be the topic of this thread but has exposed something i had never heard or read before. Well, this person wanted to be a smartazz and showed us, with a victorious sparkle in the eye, one of the latest New Scientist weekly magazine, N2692, 24 Jan 2009. The front page offers us a quite attracting assertion: "Darwin was wrong..." and in smaller letters: "...cutting down the tree of life". The illustration is a drawing of a tree containing various animal forms.The person I mentioned did not read the article. I did, with my modest understanding of the evolution theory and of technical english. Simply put, the article in question says that Darwin first pictured a TREE to represent graphically evolution in time, as anyone interested in this matter knows, but now many seem to agree on the fact that a WEB would depict the process better, because of genetic material swapping between species (quoting: "often across huge taxonomic distances")or hybridisation. Thus, descent with modification would not have to be seen only as vertical, but in many other ways too.As i'm quite ignorant concerning many small details that can mean huge changes in the theory, i'd like to have your input and points of view about it.

I've been discussing this point with another colleague involved in this funny issue and he thinks the same; according to him publishing such a cover is quite an unresponsible, dangerous thing to do. I personnally think slightly otherwise. I had read almost nothing from New Scientist until this one. I mean that some people's gullibility and, let's call it what it is, ignorance, can be a way to make ME a little less ignorant. If my fundie colleague had not put the magazine on this desk, maybe I would have never read the article. It's quite a selfish way of seeing it but it's often happening like this.One more exemple: I never was really interested in the evolution topic until i began posting in a forum, supposed to be a place mainly for musicians and music lovers. But forum are what they are and we sometimes wind up in surrealistic arguments in threads with surrealistic titles. To make it short: the one person who gave birth to my interest in the topic is a pure, obtuse, titanium-headed fundamentalist. I guess this hapens often, everywhere. If i may, i would say that "the lord works in mysterious ways"! Nice one lyx2no! Though I still BELIEVE in my favourite Zappa quote...

quote:

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One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

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But if I can't beat a tsunami of ignorance with my tiny jug of knowledge, i will keep on filling the jug, thanks to people like you who posted on this thread. Thank you

Thank you Modulous!