The New Scientist has a stunning article called Darwin Was Wrong! It is well worth reading the whole article. Human programmers use modules of code that can be reused in unrelated projects. The observation that all creatures have large parts of DNA in common does not rule out a creator because code reuse is what intelligent human programmes strive for. A good piece of code can be reused in many situations with little change. However if DNA is a code written by a creator we would expect him to reuse code wherever it is needed and not according to a strict hierarchy as common descent would imply. However rather than admit that this common code shows creative genius the New Scientist thinks it is the work of unintelligent viruses:
Last year, for example, a team at the University of Texas at Arlington found a peculiar chunk of DNA in the genomes of eight animals - the mouse, rat, bushbaby, little brown bat, tenrec, opossum, anole lizard and African clawed frog - but not in 25 others, including humans, elephants, chickens and fish. This patchy distribution suggests that the sequence must have entered each genome independently by horizontal transfer (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 17023).
In fact, by some reckonings, 40 to 50 per cent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which has taken on vital biological functions (New Scientist, 27 August 2008, p 38).
For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. “For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life,” says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,” says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.