Plants: The assured results of modern evolutionary science ...

Friend Geoff Robinson offers a transcript from this PBS show to demonstrate why Darwin’s famed “ye Tree of Life” is now basically a ground cover:

NARRATOR: Now with the assurance of DNA insight, the family tree of living flowering plants has largely been written.

The old family tree was now in for a major pruning. Roses were found to be closely related to squash, strawberries to marijuana, this meat-eating pitcher plant to China's famous rhododendrons.

For centuries water lilies were thought to be nearly twins with the lotus—no longer.

MARK CHASE: This, believe it or not, is the closest living relative of the lotus. This is the London plane tree or sycamore. As you can see, this is not a little water plant, this is a big tree.

ANDREW DARRAGH (Horticulturist, Kew Gardens): …driving me nuts!

NARRATOR: Andy Darragh is in charge of tending to a garden at Kew that is organized by the old family tree of plants, it's called the Order Beds. He's got the somewhat overwhelming job of trying to bring order to the new order.

ANDY DARRAGH: We're in this weird limbo period. I'm trying to not only do a job of gardening, mowing, edging, and weeding constantly, but I've also got to keep myself up to date. And I've also got to try and understand plant science and botany. I wish it was simpler, but it's not.

Don't sweat, Andy. By the time you've got the new order worked out, it will all change again.

Who knew that plants' relationships so closely resembled the daytime soaps?

Darwinian evolution produces new species, right?

In textbook folklore and pop science TV shows, yes. Otherwise,

University of Bristol (England) bacteriologist Alan H. Linton went looking for direct evidence of speciation and concluded in 2001: “None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of twenty to thirty minutes, and populations achieved after eighteen hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another. . . Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [i.e., bacterial] to eukaryotic [i.e., plant and animal] cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.”21 So evolution’s smoking gun is still missing. Darwinists claim that all species have descended from a common ancestor through variation and selection, but they can’t point to a single observed instance in which even one species has originated in this way. Never in the field of science have so many based so much on so little.

I hope that guy Linton still has a job.

- From Jonathan Wells’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), p. 59.