Tuesday, January 19, 2010  The Plausibility of Life  When
creationists, or, as they would have it, advocates of
"intelligent design," talk about the "weaknesses" of
evolutionary theory, knowledgeable people generally roll their
eyes and ignore them. This is appropriate, as these advocates
only raise the questions in a disingenuous attempt to promote a
religious agenda, under the pretense of open-mindedness and
"teaching the controversy." In truth, there is no controversy in
the scientific community about the dominant role of natural
selection (evolution, the theory) in shaping the observed
billions of years of change (evolution, the fact) of life on
this planet.  But this response obscures the fact that very
interesting issues in evolution remain poorly understood.  I'm
not referring to the direct exchange of genetic material between
single-cell organisms, although that does call into question the
tree-like structure of relationships between these simple
species. But at the level of complex, multi-cellular cr