Scott: I did put the date on it, didn’t I?

On the newspaper article, no. The 2006 date was only mentioned down at the bottom of your post in the ref to the journal article.

someone is making a terrible fool of themselves.

“…someone made a terrible fool of themselves 2 years ago.”Besides, it seems to me that it was adequately covered in this ScienceBlog item from 2 years ago – http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/think_before_morphing.phpLook, it was sloppy not to (at the least) specify up front that this was a retrospective post on something that was two years old. All it would have taken was “This is two years old, but still as relevant as ever.”If you can’t bring yourself to admit the sloppiness, I have nothing more to add.

Come to think of it, the late Stephen Jay Gould might have been upset with the above illustration. Contrary to the popular imagination, evolution is not a linear process that culminates in the triumphal ascent of humans at the top of the genetic heap. The process is analogous to a bush, where twigs and leaves push out in every direction.

When biologists talk about evolution and the survival of the fittest, they do not necessarily mean the strongest, fastest or smartest. Fitness is whatever works in a particular environment, and the new research shows that as environments change, notions of fitness change, too.

(Was that in the original version, or was it added later?)The picture caption just sucks, though. I wonder if somebody else wrote it. (Maybe the artist, or an editor.)There’s nothing intrinsicallly wrong with a linear illustration of the evolution of a given species, as long as you make it clear that what you’re talking about is a particular path through a tree to some descendant you’re particularly interested in.