Who watched the program on BBC 1 two days ago on Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life?
As ever, the BBC and David Attenborough are excellent, and deserve praise for putting this out at a time when fundamentalist / creationist propaganda is on the rise. I say excellent, but the programme was not, sadly without its faults. The concept of evlution being a “tree” is fundamentally wrong for anyone who has any knowledge of the subject. Sadly this error even extends to the programme title, and was perpetuated in the dialogue on many occasions. The image of a “tree of life” is entrenched within popular culture and textbooks, but is highly innacurate. It is enhanced by popular diagrams of smooth evolutionary progress, e.g. horses, humans, and it implies a smooth passage of ever more complex life forms, from simple early forms right up to mankind at the top of the tree (which sends a sort of pseudo-biblical message of mankind dominating all other life forms?!?). In reality, the progress of evloution, as established from the fossil record, is never smooth, but is jumpy (or punctuat
