The Molecular Tangled Bank: Not Seeing the Phylogenies for the Trees.

About 40 years ago, in a gesture of civic enlightenment, the United States Congress passed legislation that converted the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA; in existence since 1915) to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). The Space Act, no doubt in partial response to the launching of the first near-Earth satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union, established NASA in 1958. This legislation is arguably the most well-written and enlightened government document to be created since the 18th century Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence. Many of the stated goals of the 1958 Space Act were meant to generate new knowledge about the universe at large, but the statement that has most directly concerned molecular evolution is the following (1, p. 4):