It was not peer-reviewed. And was created and funded based on ideological presuppositions.
Meanwhile in the real-world, it has long been known that the evolutionary tree is a graph. But the degree of lateral gene transfer is typically thought to be small. Even more so for more complex taxa. (Perhaps more common in bacteria, for example).
Please don't confuse this website or paper with science. The author would need to do a lot more work in a very different intellectual context to make it so.
(Although a little bit of divergent thinking is healthy for the mind)
Still much more advanced than the average creationist who only offers doubt and a supernatural explanation
From wikipedia on the Discovery Institute: "Discovery Institute is a politically conservative non-profit think tank based in Seattle, Washington, that advocates the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design."
Would that happen via crossbreeding? Or some mysterious form of gene "absorption"?
"As a consequence, all purported evolutionary trees and sequences become highly suspect, including such icons as the whale and human series. For they are based on similarities of traits between species, and similarities are an unreliable indicator of common ancestry as implied by the trees’ typically low adjusted consistency indices. Instead, similarities appear to be the result of a designer reusing design modules in different species to meet common goals.
Ewert’s article represents only the first step in evaluating and developing his framework. Still, the significance of this research cannot be overstated. The dependency graph model explains why subsets of the biological data crudely fit a tree pattern and why so much of the data is incongruent. It also makes clear predictions on the results of future studies on the distribution across species of both physical traits and similarities in molecular data. Finally, it should lead to a robust and innovative research program based on the intelligent design framework. "
> These disappointing results have required evolutionists to devise several ad hoc mechanisms to explain the ubiquitous inconsistencies. Examples include lateral gene transfer (LGT), differential gene loss, and convergent evolution. Yet, the widescale appeal to LGT has been seriously questioned.
LGT is a synonym for HGT. I'm not sure why the article brings this up, since the model (DAG vs tree) and the mechanical implementation (LGT, etc.) are different things. The need for a mechanical explanation (defined by observation) does not change with a new model (also defined by observation). That said, new models can provide the right mental states to speed up discovery of correct mechanisms, so this work may have some significance, but it will be impossible to tell a priori.
On the lineage of species, the actual heritage and relationship through evolution is more of an acyclic graph. We just have species that we know fill the gap between other species enough to know that a tree is the simplest way to depict evolution over billions of years, just like a tree may depict a family genealogy or family tree but even then we know its not all linear because humans have married between families and been incestuous at times.
However, I didn't know that the web site itself was an intelligent design site.