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I'll get back to you in more detail when I've read the whole article, but a checking of subjects with which I'm comfortable up front shows a bountiful lode of Discovery-style cafeteria science. The signs, in fact, are there even before I get to "my" parts.

This, for instance, is a rebuttal to Tamzek's arguments from banded iron formations, pyrites, uraninites, etc. that the early atmosphere was anoxic.

Canil (2002) actually found that vanadium redox states in peridotite-bearing mantle xenoliths and Archean cratons imply that Earth's mantle was just as oxidized in the Archean as it is today109. The paper concluded that, "such reduced [atmospheric] components [CO and H2] are not supported by results of this and many other studies, which imply a scenario of Archean mantle redox not unlike that of today"109

That's cafeteria "science" right there. Find one guy doing one study in one mineral, one data point, and announce it as the final resolution of the matter, thus rebutting who-knows-how-many studies in three minerals. And I don't see where a lack of carbon monoxide and free hydrogen necessarily implies free oxygen. Is it really "intuitively obvious" or is Luskin just hoping I'll assume so? Color me suspicious. Already, Luskin isn't looking good and I'm just passin' through here.

In the section on the Cambrian, Luskin echoes Wells in jumping in with the usual quote salad designed to make people think even evolutionists believe that everything appeared on Jan 1, 500 mya. I don't like that, either.

Luskin then says that Tamzek merely quotes Miller and Miller really doesn't do much. My reading of Miller is at odds. He has harsh words for Wells and for Well's depiction of the Cambrian.

The Late Precambrian and Early Cambrian fossil record of the metazoan phyla shows the same pattern as that of class- and order-level taxa in the Phanerozoic. Near the origin of these higher-level taxonomic categories, the boundaries between the taxa become blurred and fossils become difficult to classify. Moving back in time toward their presumed point of diversion from a common ancestor, organisms belonging to separate phyla converge in morphology. Several Early Cambrian organisms possess morphologies that bear similarities to more than one phylum, making their placement in existing phyla a matter of dispute. This classification problem is resolved either by erecting new phyla or by broadening definitions to include the new forms.

What he's saying and nobody is answering is that bin-gaming creationists (I include ID-ers here, of course) ignore the classification difficulties and the tendency of the binned objects to resemble each other as you go back in time until you don't know what bin a thing belongs in. This means Wells is wrong. Miller is specifically saying that the late Precambrian and early Cambrian sediments show evolution. He or Tamzek might as well have mentioned that Morton explains the same point with more examples.

Moving on in Luskin:

The bottom line is that the gene duplication explanation still leaves the details to the dice, and this pathway definitely hasn't been experimentally verified. All Espiritu et al. have found are protein homologies, and then inferred a vague ancestral pathway of gene creation. This explanation for the origin of real evolutionary novelty lacks a reliable mechanism and is little better than hand waving.

I would say Luskin is doing the hand-waving here if he still doesn't believe in gene duplication, or that it means anything. ID is lagging mainstream genetics by about 40 years on this point because of what it doesn't want to be true.

The section on Archaeopteryx is such a groaner that I hardly know where to begin. Archaeopteryx looks at least as much like a dromaeosaur as it does like a bird. In itself it's almost a perfect intermediate. Here's Tamzek on Wells.

Archaeopteryx has long been something that creationists have felt the need to deal with somehow, as it is a clear fossil intermediate between two vertebrate classes. However, creationist claims have been refuted so often and so thoroughly regarding Archaeopteryx that very little remains for Wells to do except raise a smoke screen over whether or not Archaeopteryx was the actual species through which the genes of the last common ancestor of modern birds passed, or whether it was a closely related side-branch. Either way, it is clear evidence that a transition between the classes occurred.

Here's Luskin on Tamzek:

Tamzek claims that Wells' only gripe is that Archaeopteryx is not a true ancestor of birds, however Wells' criticisms go far beyond that. Wells notes that the geological layer which bore Caudipteryx and Protoarchaeopteryx radiometrically dates to about 120 Ma41, while Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, is said to be about 150 Ma42--and even more modern looking birds appear soon after. In fact, the ordering of the fossil record has led some to suggest that these Dromeosaurs are not dinosaurs, but flightless birds descended from previous birds, such as Archeaopteryx.43 Other alleged even more bird-like theropods, such as Velociraptor do not appear until some 70 m.y. after Archaeopteryx92. Later in the avian fossil record, the extremely rapid appearance of the major bird groups, about 70-80 Ma, preceded by a long period where bird fossils are few and far between36 has been termed "bird evolution's big bang"44 by some paleontologists who say that birds evolved "explosively"44.
The alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds thus appear about 30 million years after the birds themselves, and we have no fossils documenting the diversification of the major bird groups. When considering the hypothesis that birds descended from dinosaurs, how sure can we therefore be sure that there really were reptilian ancestors of birds? From what, exactly, if anything, did birds evolve? Perhaps the weak constraints of evolutionary theory allow a hypothetical tree to still be constructed, but Wells is correct to assert that, "immense stretches of time are left with no fossil evidence to support cladistic phylogenies" (Icons, pg. 120). It is this lack of fossils which provides the basis for the Wells' critique.

The actual arguments given here aren't very good. Fossils mostly appear in the order you'd expect, but they don't absolutely have to because the fossil record is too spotty. The main thing is, neither Wells nor Luskin has actually addressed why Archaeopteryx looks just as much like a dinosaur as it does a bird. If you don't do that, you might as well admit you have no answer for Archaeopteryx.

I now doubt I'll spend any more time on this turkey of an article. You don't have to eat the whole omelet to know it's got a bad egg. Out for the night.