Quetzal

lp: All I can say is that I'm impressed you were able to actually follow ReMine's argument. I have rarely seen a more incoherent, rambling, and pointless essay by anyone. (Well, as an aside to pangloss, except for Peter Borger. )

Deadbeat

So... we're wrong ... because ... we're right?

lpetrich

ReMine was essentially arguing that evolutionary biology is capable of explaining essentially anything -- meaning that it thus violates the falsifiability principle.

But Morpho is right about that essay's content; ReMine has listed a mishmash of mechanisms and patterns of evolution without clearly distinguishing what is mechanism and what is pattern -- and without mentioning such mechanisms and natural selection and orthogenesis (evolution by purely internal forces).

Thus, ReMine claims that evolution does not predict hierarchy by mashing all those mechanisms and patterns together; however, in the absence of lateral gene transfer, hierarchy is exactly what is predicted -- and observed!

As Thomas notes, lateral gene transfer is rare in multicelled organisms, because the germ cells are a small fraction of total cells. Thus, as he points out, eating beef does not make us grow horns -- though similar things do happen with one-celled organisms.

With one-celled organisms, it is conceivable that LGT would totally scramble their lineages, making whole-organism phylogenies meaningless. They would thus become like individuals of sexually-reproducing species, whose ancestry becomes diffused over an entire population as one looks farther back. But in such species, genetic material inherited from only one parent does show well-defined phylogenies, which forms an additional analogy.

However, one can test for whether that has indeed happened, and one finds that there are some "core" genes that seldom get scrambled by LGT -- mostly informational genes like those responsible for transcription and translation.

Poor Woese has become another victim of creationist misunderstanding; he has never proposed multiple origins of all Earth's known life -- he's proposed that the earliest life had had massive LGT.