We referred yesterday to a new article by Maureen Kearney and Matthew Haber. (See, “Testing Phylogenetic Hypotheses: A Question for You.”) Actually, there’s a backstory to it. Haber, at the University of Utah, has been troubled for years by the frank historical conflict between different lines of evidence when constructing, or inferring, the Tree of Life.
So, in 2025, he proposed that there JUST IS NO “true history of life.” Don’t look for it, as if one could actually find it, because it doesn’t exist. Except he still wants to say that common descent (whatever that means) is true. From the Abstract:
We are currently in the midst of what I call biology’s Einstein moment. This is the rejection of absolute biological history, the idea that there is an invariant, privileged biological history against which other histories are measured or deviate from. Instead, biologists must specify theoretically and empirically motivated frames of lineal reference.
If one says that something isn’t real, and yet we can know it — not far down that road lies utter incomprehension.
By the way, that last sentence we quoted yesterday was noteworthy as a promising candidate for a Worst Non-Fiction Prose competition. Check it out again in case you missed it: “Phylogeny should be approached as a multidimensional, multimodal, processual system subject to continuous change and interaction — in other words, a hierarchy of stabilized processes actively maintained over different timescales.”
Right, whatever you say!