Re: [asa] TE/EC Response

>3. This paragraph is interesting:
>
>>And the evidence keeps coming...a few weeks ago there was some discussion
>>of the origin of the immune system in Science (including a picture from
>>the Dover trial with a stack of books and papers confounding Behe's claim
>>that there was no theory of the origin of this complex system). It
>>appears that vertebrates got it via some lateral gene transfer in a viral
>>infection.
>
>You call this "evidence"? I call it "sheer
>speculation". "*It appears that* vertebrates
>got it via some lateral gene transfer". It
>appears to that way to whom? What you mean is
>that someone *has speculated that* vertebrates
>may have got it via some lateral gene transfer.
>The purported event happened hundreds of
>millions of years ago and we cannot recover it.
>(And notice the vague qualifier: "some" lateral
>gene transfer -- its advocates can't even
>precisely define it. Why don't they specify the
>nucleotide sequence that in their opinion got
>transferred? I would guess because they don't
>have the slightest clue.) Why would you pass
>off this surmise about a unique, one-time event
>which can never be observed, or demonstrated to
>have happened, as "science"? What Faraday and
>Newton and Mendeleev and Pasteur did was
>science. This kind of speculation, without
>genetic details, is story-telling, neither
>confirmable nor falsifiable; it teaches nothing,
>and adds nothing to the stock of human knowledge.
>

For what it's worth, the article was referring to
the following work on the RAG1 and RAG2 genes,
which code for the recombinase that brings about
somatic VDJ recombination to produce the
diversity of antibody and T cell receptor genes
that are the heart of the adaptive immune
response. As it happens, the articles were listed
in the references for the article in Science and
are available in full text for free.

Preston

An ancient evolutionary origin of the Rag1/2 gene locus.
Sebastian D. Fugmann*, Cynthia MessierÝ, Laura A.
Novack*, R. Andrew Cameroný, and Jonathan P.
RastÝ,§
PNAS March 7, 2006 vol. 103 no. 10 3728-3733
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/10/3728.full?sid=e74665b1-ae67-477e-a80c-456c91affd4b

Kapitonov VV, Jurka J (2005) RAG1 Core and V(D)J
Recombination Signal Sequences Were Derived from
Transib Transposons. PLoS Biol 3(6): e181.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030181
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0030181

(2005) Uncovering the Ancient Source of Immune
System Variety. PLoS Biol 3(6): e212.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030212
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0030212

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Received on Fri Jul 17 17:19:46 2009