Venter vs. Dawkins on the Tree of Life -- and Another Dawkins Whopper

Another Dawkins Whopper: The Universality of the Genetic Code

Since at least the publication of The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Richard Dawkins has claimed that the genetic code is universal across all organisms on earth. This is "near-conclusive proof," he writes, that every living thing on this planet "descended from a single common ancestor" (1986, p. 270) at the root of Darwin's universal tree of life.

More recently, Dawkins repeated the claim in his bestseller The Greatest Show On Earth