The basic difference between science and religion is that science is grown up while religion is essentially childish. This is illustrated by a controversy which has suddenly blown up in a fairly obscure but nonetheless interesting aspect of evolutionary biology in the last week.
An
interesting paper was published a few days ago which seemed to show that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) may account for up to 18% of the tardigrade ('water bear') genome, suggesting that HGT could have played a bigger role in the evolution of multicellular organisms than is generally recognised.
HGT is widely suspected to have played a part in the evolution of prokaryote cells so that acquiring genes evolved in another species could have been a short-cut to evolution or a way for new combinations of genes to come together, analogous to sexual reproduction. In eukaryote cells, the incorporation of prokaryotes was a form of HGT after all, but for HGT to have played a wider role in the evolution of multicellular species would be surprising - hence the interest in this paper and why I
wrote about it.
Now, however, another group has
published a paper which suggests that the result of the genome analysis may have been an artifact produced by contamination: