Charles Darwin's tree of life disputed

Source: Lawton, Graham. "Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life." New Scientist 21 January 2009. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.600-why-darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life.html

Briefing: The scientific perceptions on how to classify nature are changing as Darwin's canonical tree of life is now being reconstructed to resemble the web of life after the study of DNA/RNA patterns have revealed huge and intricate trends of gene swapping between species. Rather than perceiving evolution to be a vertical descent up and down the branches of this tree, scientists are now beginning to perceive the evolutionary trajectories to be horizontal in a larger "web" model of life. The article compares the tree of life to Newtonian thought: canonical but too antiquated to adequately explain emerging concepts in accordance with contemporary trends in interpreting information.