from tree to web?

This New Scientist article is probably the source. This is a secondary article. You can read the abstract from the primary source [The impact of reticulate evolution on genome phylogeny - PubMed]here[/url].What Doolittle and Bapteste are saying is that lateral gene trasfer was common early in life before animals came along. This prevents us from constructing a true, single tree for ALL life. However, the tree still stands for big, macroscopic animals because there is a lack of lateral gene transfer.For the creationists, this is a non-winner. In order for them to use this evidence they must first agree that all life evolved from unicellular organisms.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

I prefer the metaphor "the root ball of life".The figure below is taken from Doolittle's Scientific American article "Uprooting the Tree of Life" (February 2000). Scientific American

It is happening with human engineered species. My favorite is the Glofish. It carries a copy of the jellyfish GFP gene which causes it to fluoresce in UV light. I haven't dug into the history behind the Glofish, but I strongly suspect that it has it's roots in the basic research lab. GFP reporter genes are common place in evo-devo studies that study transcription factors. Anyway . . .As to retroviruses, it comes close. However, this does not involve transfer of DNA from one species to the next but it does cause divergent species to share DNA not found in their common ancestor. There is also the case of mitochondrial DNA making it's way into the host genome. If you still consider mitochondria to be an endosymbiot this may count, but barely.If this were going on it would be pretty easy to spot given the wealth of genomic data that is out there.

It's also worth mentioning that the lack of a tree due to HGT has been known for quite a while. It's old news.However, this is actually a perfect trap for creationists. We should just let them run free with this for a little while. All we have to do is ask them what methodologies these scientists used in order to detect HGT. They will then have to accept common ancestry between speices that are not in the same "kind".