Last year, scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington found a strange chunk of DNA in the genetic make-up of eight animals, including the mouse, rat and the African clawed frog. The same chunk is missing from chickens, elephants and humans, suggesting it must have become wedged into the genomes of some animals by crossbreeding.
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."
Source: Evolution: Charles Darwin was wrong about the tree of life by Ian Sample
The BBC's somewhat breathless blurb beneath the headline reads, "Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force of evolution." But a more proper way of characterizing it would be that this was one facet of natural selection that he didn't immediately foresee.
There are plenty of examples of this. Darwin didn't know what DNA was, and therefore couldn't have predicted the complexities of modern genetics. He didn't understand that certain situations in the natural world could confer advantages upon organisms that worked as a group instead of as selfish individuals — in other words, he didn't have an explanation for altruism.
But when a theory survives a century and a half of rigorous scientific skepticism and scrutiny, and is bolstered by mountains upon mountains of experimental evidence — as the notion of natural selection has, and is — it may not be the be all and end all of science. But it's a fair bet that the idea, and its creator, are right.
Source: How Much Did Darwin Get Wrong? by Michael Reilly
Other people too, not just scriptural literalists, remain unpersuaded about evolution. According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.
Only 37 percent of the polled Americans were satisfied with allowing room for both God and Darwin—that is, divine initiative to get things started, evolution as the creative means. (This view, according to more than one papal pronouncement, is compatible with Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god.
The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't changed much in two decades. Gallup interviewers posed exactly the same choices in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999. The creationist conviction—that God alone, and not evolution, produced humans—has never drawn less than 44 percent. In other words, nearly half the American populace prefers to believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most
Source: Was Darwin Wrong? By David Quammen