You’re totally misreading it. The problems being found currently with the “Tree of Life” were not comprehensible to Darwin or creationists, and the solution is no closer to short-earth creationism, and in fact explains away many of the problems which have plagued evolution. The fact that more highly evolved organisms may be chimeras of other organisms, for instance, explains complications of features which mere sexual selection could not.
The Tree of Life was helpful in getting the general public to understand Darwin, but it was not the evidence for Darwin.
— An “Old-Earth” creationist.
The Creation Scientists have been pointing to far more than just DNA evidence. But come to think of it, they have been pointing to the DNA evidence for quite some time now as well.
They sure as hell sold it that way.
It seems to me that the inter-related web of complexity-of-design, in the so-called “horizontal gene transfer” is most plausibly accounted for by commonalities in a Designer, than by some unaccounted-for cross-special transfer.
Just as Ferraris and Fiats share certain core parts (circuits, lightbulbs, steel, copper, rubber, etc) while being completely different animals, as it were, and the most logical explanation—and what we know from history—is commonality of the designer (or designers, in this case). So too it makes sense that from the molecular level, into DNA/RNA, on up to the shape of an eye, or the hands of man and monkeys, the commonality was originally found in the mind of God—not some imagined utterly-hypothetical inter-species transfer.
Thank God the tree is falling...may the web not ensnare us also!
(It is interesting how the models for science follow the prevailing philosophies of the day, eh? Modernism was all about universal paradigms (like that of a Tree), while post-modernism is all about a Web of related-ness, and skepticism toward any universals).