Debunking Evolution Clip: Cladograms

So, we could organize it as simplest to most complex.

Or, by color.

See, organization just is not my thing.

Once, my little sister asked me to organize all her little tiny plastic animals.

It took me two days.

Organizing animals?

It's like Carl Linnaeus.

Who's that?

Yeah, he was the first guy to classify animals.

Oh, oh, oh, yeah, I remember him now.

His motto was, God created, Linnaeus ordered.

Yeah, his work is the basis for the classification system we still use today.

Later, Charles Darwin sketched a diagram to show how life started simple and then branched out to every creature on Earth.

He said the different branches represent the different levels of classification.

A tree of life, if you will.

Oh, yeah.

I keep seeing this over and over again in our textbooks.

Really?

Yeah.

Here we go.

Check out this one.

Are researchers still trying to figure out how it happened?

There are a lot more of these diagrams.

I think they change as different researchers group them based on different features.

These charts show groups of organisms they believe share a common ancestor.

Yeah, a group like that is called a clade, and these diagrams are called cladograms.

Hmm.

Man, and I thought organizing my makeup was hard.

So do they.

Well, not your makeup.

Classifying animals.

Okay, so remember that modern evolutionary classification is a rapidly changing science with a

difficult goal, to present all life on a single evolutionary tree.

As evolutionary biologists study relationships among taxa, they regularly change not only the

way organisms are grouped, but also sometimes the name of groups.

Remember that cladograms are visual presentations of hypotheses about relationships and not hard

and fast facts.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

You're saying our textbooks say that cladograms are based off hypotheses, not

facts.

Yeah.

I'll show you why.

Flip forward a page.

That's because they only have living animals or fossils for certain places on the branches.

These are real animals or fossils we've actually discovered.

But these branching points are just imaginary lines that represent the hypotheses about which animals

evolved from a common ancestor.

No facts support them that can't also support different links or no links.

The transitional fossils they represent have never been found.

If they were, well, we'd see their pictures here, right?

Though evolutionists point to a few examples, there should be thousands.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.