The question isn't whether Woese is an "interesting guy", or whether he and his colleagues do interesting work, but whether the original article posted at the beginning of this thread is anything more than hot air or hype -- which it clearly is -- and that could have been predicted even before reading the New Scientist article by simply reading both the subject line and the original passage quoted from Buchanan's NS article (as Carrol seems to have done).
Carrol's problem with this whole subject line/thread is worth repeating: "What bothered me was the subject line. It announces a banality as though it were brand new, and thereby even cheapens the excitement of the actual discoveries."
The research paper by Vetsigian et al.(2006) that the New Scientist article is actually describing is certainly a very interesting paper -- and a relatively accessible paper that can be read here on the PNAS site without a subscription: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/28/10696.full Clearly no one has a problem with this research being described as interesting, exciting or important -- just with how it's being represented, by both the NS article's author and its enthusiastic supporters on this list, as though it were some sort of paradigmatic challenge to Darwinism... which is simply nonsense! And that also goes for the claims being made on this list about horizontal gene transfer being some sort of recent and big challenge to darwinism. This stuff is decades old and HGT's possible roles in evolution has been discussed and investigated for almost as long.
The author of this New Scientist article is either incompetent or lazy... and, I would guess, a bit of a snake-oil salesman.
-mep