In this era of Big Data, the prevailing wisdom is that more information leads to better answers. However, a new Canadian study shows that in the hunt for life’s ancient ancestors, more data can actually lead to less truth. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research by UdeM associate professor of computer science Miklós Csűrös reveals that standard methods for reconstructing the genomes of ancient microbes are being overwhelmed by an explosion of information.

This paradox causes current models to “hallucinate” evolutionary events—specifically, an implausibly high number of horizontal gene transfers—that are actually just statistical ghosts, the study shows.

In it, Csűrös identifies a crisis point in evolutionary biology: As researchers try to reconcile thousands of gene sequences across the entire tree of life, the actual evolutionary signal begins to vanish, replaced by mathematical noise.