Evolution may occur through a dependency graph, not the conventional simple tree

This is an article from an antievolution, pro-intelligent design, &#x27;science news&#x27; website, run by the Discovery Institute. It is promoting a paper from their own journal.<p>It was not peer-reviewed. And was created and funded based on ideological presuppositions.<p>Meanwhile in the real-world, it has long been known that the evolutionary tree is a graph. But the degree of lateral gene transfer is typically thought to be small. Even more so for more complex taxa. (Perhaps more common in bacteria, for example).<p>Please don&#x27;t confuse this website or paper with science. The author would need to do a lot more work in a very different intellectual context to make it so.

Their about page (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;evolutionnews.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;evolutionnews.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a>) lists &quot;Discovery Institute&quot; as the copyright owner.<p>From wikipedia on the Discovery Institute: &quot;Discovery Institute is a politically conservative non-profit think tank based in Seattle, Washington, that advocates the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design.&quot;

Would this imply that species have a clever way to acquire &quot;modules&quot; from other species?<p>Would that happen via crossbreeding? Or some mysterious form of gene &quot;absorption&quot;?

The &quot;conventional simple tree&quot; is just a depiction of data put into visual representation easy for humans to understand.<p>On the lineage of species, the actual heritage and relationship through evolution is more of an acyclic graph. We just have species that we know fill the gap between other species enough to know that a tree is the simplest way to depict evolution over billions of years, just like a tree may depict a family genealogy or family tree but even then we know its not all linear because humans have married between families and been incestuous at times.

May be they are Modules with feature toggles and evolution just turns on&#x2F;off what is there already.