Subject: Confronting Intelligent Design arguments directly in the scientific literature
From: Klaas Vandepoele <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:37:22 +0000

Sent to you by Klaas Vandepoele via Google Reader: Confronting
Intelligent Design arguments directly in the scientific literature via
The Tree of Life by [email-masked] (Jonathan Eisen) on 1/20/10

A representative from Wiley publishing sent me a link to an interesting
new paper. Entitled "Using Protistan Examples to Dispel the Myths of
Intelligent Design" by Mark Farmer, from the University of Georgia and
Andrea Habura, from the University at Albany, New York. It is from the
Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology and is based upon a presentation
they gave at a workshop at a conference.

Basically, the article is a detailed discussion of how examples
relating to microbial eukaryotes (I hate the term protist ...) that are
used by Intelligent Design advocates are, well, BS. And the article
discusses the evidence that refutes the ID arguments.

One thing they discuss is the issue of the Cambrian Explosion. ID
supporters, such as Stephen Meyer have made many arguments about they
feel the diversification in the Cambrian is not explainable through
evolutionary processes. Farmer and Habura refute this by pointing out
that the diversity seen in microbial eukaryotes at the time of the
Cambrian was immense and that what came out of the "explosion" was
actually not that spectacular relative to what already existed in the
microbial eukaryotes:
The extant diversity of the protists should therefore be seen as
the "background radiation" of the eukaryotic Big Bang, with the
Cambrian radiation of the metazoa being a subsequent event within a
specific group.
They go on to discuss examples involving speciation, the fossil record,
evolution of drug resistance in Plasmodium, and a few other things. In
each case they discuss a claim by ID supporters and then discuss
evidence for why this claim is not valid. Overall the paper is worth
reading if you are involved in any discussions with ID supporters.

I note that when I finished the above writing, I went to look at Pubmed
to find other examples of people taking on ID arguments in the
literature with a focus on issues in microbes. Here are two other
recent examples:

- Introduction: Protistan Biology, Horizontal Gene Transfer, and Common
Descent Uncover Faulty Logic in Intelligent Design.
- Bacterial flagella and Type III secretion: case studies in the
evolution of complexity.
FARMER, M., & HABURA, A. (2010). Using Protistan Examples to Dispel the
Myths of Intelligent Design Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology, 57 (1),
3-10 DOI: 10.1111/j.1550-7408.2009.00460.x
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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary
biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California,
Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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