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