As for the New Scientist cover, my link describes it as,
"Modern scientists and geneticists are now saying that representing evolutionary history as a tree is misleading. A more realistic way to represent the origins and inter-relatedness of species would be an “impenetrable thicket.”
Darwin himself also wrote about evolution and ecosystems as a “tangled bank.”
"We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, told New Scientist magazine.
Genetic tests on bacteria, plants and animals increasingly reveal that different species crossbreed and form hybrids more than originally thought, meaning that instead of genes simply being passed down individual branches of the tree of life, they are also transferred between species on different evolutionary paths. The result is a messier and more tangled “web of life.”
The findings mean that to link species by Darwin's evolutionary branches is an oversimplification.
"The tree of life is being politely buried," said Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change."
It is interesting to note, too, that Darwin, evolution’s best-known advocate, when advancing his theory of evolution, had his own doubts about mankind’s origin and indicated an awareness of his theory’s limitations.
In his conclusion to The Origin of Species, he wrote of the grandeur of the “view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” thus making it evident that the subject of origins was open to further examination.
And Darwin conceded in Chapter 9 of his book that “the distinctness of specific [living] forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.”
The author Graham Lawton is not even mentioned. I'll try to reply to your previous post next.
