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.
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