Hope this furthers the discussion in a helpful way.
Jim
*****
TG> Dig a little deeper and apply reasonable standards of plausibility
> and you will see that Mike's claim about the literature is just plain
> wrong and that nearly every biochemist knows it.
MB:
The biochemists who do not know it include 1) James Shapiro of the University
of Chicago (reviewing my book in National Review Shapiro writes, "There are no
detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical
or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." 2) Andrew
Pmiankowski, a biochemist at London College who reviewed the book for New
Scientist wrote, "Pick up any biochemistry textbook, and you will find perhaps
two or three references to evolution. Turn to one of these and you will be
lucky to find anything better than 'evolution selects the fittest
molecules for their biological function.'" Even the evolutionary
biologists who have bitterly attacked my book, including Jerry Coyne and
Tom Cavalier-Smith, admit that the systems I describe are very complex
and their evolution difficult to understand (of course, they rally round
the flag and say that we may (or may not) understand their evolution in
the future).
I think the problem is that Terry's, and most evolutionists',
"reasonable standards of plausibility" are remarkably low, so that if
they see sequence homology in components of two horrendously complicated
systems, they declare the problem of the evolution of the system to be
solved in principle. (Another strategy, favored by Terry, is to point to
systems that require very little change, such as hemoglobin to
myoglobin, and then to say they see no difference between those systems
and horrendously complicated ones, such as the flagellum or
intracellular transport.) My book shows that those problems are *not*
solved in principle by sequence comparisons, and that very few people
have even attempted to take the discussion beyond sequence comparisons.