This paper argues that the issue with the origin of life and the origin of biodiversity is not an issue of time, though estimations of deep time are problematical. Instead the issue is the unbridgeable discontinuities among different life forms, discontinuities between biological taxa that we believe cannot be crossed by the mechanisms of random variations and natural selection. These discontinuities present themselves, time and again, as unmovable walls during molecular cloning. In an attempt to integrate the observations of fossils, studies of functions of genes and gene contents of various genomes, and lessons learned from molecular cloning, a new model designed to more accurately reflect the relationships between living things on earth is provided. Our hope is that this model will facilitate the functional annotation of genomes and the classification of organisms.