Dedicated IP hosting and search engines

There has been debate in the SEO industry for awhile regarding whether or not using a dedicated IP address is better than having a shared IP for your website...

Some SEOs suppose that there really is no good reason to obtain static IP Web hosting. Your site will not perform any better by having its own static IP.
Some others theorize that your choice of dedicated IP hosting vs. shared hosting might slightly affect your rankings (i.e. it's a factor considered by search engines).
Yet others suppose that sharing an IP address with known spam or adult sites raises a warning flag with…