Allright, forget the fossils

How is this determined? You make it appear to be independent but I don't think it is.

You claim that you can organize "organisms" ( ) by ancestry. You use the term in two other places suggesting that all organisms are included over a wide time frame. Your answer here seems to involve only very few specific critters over a short time.You seem to suggest that I can tell ancestry by knowing who gave birth to who. How does that technique fit into the bigger picture you gave at first?

quote:

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There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one;

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From Darwin page 459 "Origin of Species".Aside from the above which is really neither here nor there, the ToE doesn't suggest on it's own that there is one or multiple trees.What we find when examining life is that the evidence says there is only one major tree with extant forms today (that we recognize anyway). This isn't part of the theory it is a consequence of applying the theory to the evidence we have at hand.All of which may only be saying what you have already said in your post. However, the pedantic nit is that it is not a consequence of the theory but simple what we observe in life here today.

Darwin did suggest both one or a few trees and I noted that what Darwin had to say is, indeed, neither here nor there (not the last word).However, the theory doesn't say that there has to be one tree any more than it says how the evolving life has to have started. What I said was that we observe that life today shows very strong evidence of being part of one tree. (There is still the small chance that there is a "few" trees but most have clearly been pruned and are very small if they are there at all.