Scientists find loopholes in Darwin’s theory at 5:06 PM

Charles Darwin’s tree of life, which shows how species are related down evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists.
The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of an imaginary tree in 1837, an idea that quickly came to symbolise the theory of evolution by natural selection.
But modern genetics has revealed that representing evolutionary history as a tree is misleading, with scientists saying a more realistic way to represent the origins and inter-relatedness of species would be an impenetrable thicket. “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,” Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, told New Scientist magazine.
Genetic tests on bacteria, plants and animals increasingly reveal that species crossbreed more than originally thought, so instead of genes simply being passed down branches of the tree of life, they are also transferred between species on different evolutionary paths.
Microbes swap genetic material so promiscuously it can be hard to tell one type from another, but plants and animals regularly crossbreed too, and the offspring can be fertile. According to some estimates, 10 per cent of animals regularly form hybrids by breeding with other species.
Last year scientists at the University of Texas found a strange chunk of DNA in the genetic make-up of eight animals, including the mouse, rat and the African clawed frog.