The immune system cross-examination still burns

Heh, five years later and Casey Luskin is still trying to refute the immune system cross: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/12/five_years_later_evolutionary_042001.html

Never mind that Luskin’s one immunologist, Donald Ewert, admits that most of his colleagues, even his coauthors, are against him and use homology and comparative evidence everywhere all the time; admits that there is a mountain of literature on the evolution of the immune system; and admits (although he barely stammers it out) that there actually is an evolutionary model for the origin of receptor rearrangement in adaptive immunity and that the researchers themselves interpreted this as confirmation of the basic transposon-origins model (although Ewert somehow thinks this was just a “classification” of the RAG genes as bacterial transposons, ignoring, (a) how damned odd that is to find in vertebrate immune system genes and (b) how this was suspected ever since the 1970s and was deliberately tested in the 1990s-2000s).

Ewert’s reply basically boils down to vague denial of vast amounts of detailed work in evolutionary immunology, raw assertions that sequence similarity doesn’t suggest common ancestry (I dare Ewert/Luskin to do a survey of comparative immunologists on that point), and complaints about the literature not being detailed enough. Unfortunately for them, Behe made all these same points at trial. When you make these kinds of claims in the teeth of an entire specialized subfield which refutes you, it’s your credibility that’s shot, on the stand or anywhere else. So, try again. Give us a better, more detailed explanation of the origins of the immune system, Luskin and Ewert. Good luck!