Listening: Michael Behe crosses the warm little Pond

_{Denyse O'Leary

December 10, 2010

Culture, Darwinism, Evolution}

Share: Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; Flipboard; Print; Email

Mike Behe, widely hated author of Edge of Evolution has been on the road recently, in Britain.

Behe’s most recent heresy has been to detail what Darwinism can and can’t do, as shown in experiments and evidence. For some reason, that man has a problem with rehabilitating magic and calling it Darwinian evolution – but that is just what heretics are like.

Apparently, he got quite a bit of response, and not only from Darwin’s rice bowls. Here’s a radio program with a British Christian Darwinist, Keith Fox. Go here for the mp3 podcast and here for Itunes.

The skinny:

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. – Michael Behe

It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. – Michael Behe

Read more here.

Comments

There's also podcast up on Premier Christian Radio, recorded on Nov 27 during Behe's speaking tour of the UK in a debate held with Michael Reiss.jstanley01_{December 12, 2010
December
12
Dec
12
12
2010
01:57 PM
1
01
57
PM
PDT}

Bam-Bam Rubble (of 'The Flintstones') has more elegance than Natural Selection ever can.Ilion_{December 11, 2010
December
12
Dec
11
11
2010
03:05 PM
3
03
05
PM
PDT}

"It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. – Michael Behe" In what way is "Me Kill!" elegant. Were Natural Selection intelligent enough to utter words, that is all he could say.Ilion_{December 11, 2010
December
12
Dec
11
11
2010
03:03 PM
3
03
03
PM
PDT}

Michael Behe's new peer-reviewed paper is now on the internet. Here's the link: Experimental evolution, loss-of-function mutations, and “the first rule of adaptive evolution” Michael J. Behe Abstract: Adaptive evolution can cause a species to gain, lose, or modify a function; therefore, it is of basic interest to determine whether any of these modes dominates the evolutionary process under particular circumstances. Because mutation occurs at the molecular level, it is necessary to examine the molecular changes produced by the underlying mutation in order to assess whether a given adaptation is best considered as a gain, loss, or modification of function. Although that was once impossible, the advance of molecular biology in the past half century has made it feasible. In this paper, I review molecular changes underlying some adaptations, with a particular emphasis on evolutionary experiments with microbes conducted over the past four decades. I show that by far the most common adaptive changes seen in those examples are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function, and I discuss the possible reasons for the prominence of such mutations. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/656902bornagain77_{December 11, 2010
December
12
Dec
11
11
2010
04:27 AM
4
04
27
AM
PDT}

Here is Casey Luskin's second installment on Dr. Behe's new paper: Michael Behe's "First Rule of Adaptive Evolution" Could Undermine the Evolution of Functional Coding Elements Excerpt: Behe introduces a rule of thumb he calls the "The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution": "Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain." In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: "the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment or elimination of the activity of a protein is expected to be 100-1000 times the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that requires specific changes to a gene." http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/12/michael_behes_first_rule_of_ad041461.htmlbornagain77_{December 11, 2010
December
12
Dec
11
11
2010
02:57 AM
2
02
57
AM
PDT}

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Leave a Reply