According to John West of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture,
Ironically, in this same review where the main point seems to be that Behe doesn’t engage with evidence counter to his views, the authors state (without appreciating the irony) that Behe devotes much of one chapter to discussing Richard Lenski’s bacterial evolution experiments. Since Lenski is listed as a co-author of this book review, I was looking forward to reading a robust critique of what Behe had to say about his experiments. Get ready to be underwhelmed. Here’s the critique: “[Behe] dedicates the better part of chapter 7 to discussing a 65,000-generation Escherichia coli experiment, emphasizing the many mutations that arose that degraded function — an expected mode of adaptation to a simple laboratory environment, by the way — while dismissing improved functions and deriding one new one as a ‘sideshow.’” That’s it? Yes, that’s it. On the one topic where the authors surely might have provided a devastating critique of Behe — if they had one — they effectively offer nothing.
If scientists like Swamidass, Lenski, and Lents want to continue to offer these faux critiques of Behe, that is certainly their right. But they are damaging their own credibility, not Behe’s. Such critiques will no doubt continue to convince true believers like atheist Darwinist Jerry Coyne. But they won’t impress scientists who are open-minded enough to read Behe or other ID proponents for themselves. How do I know this? Because I’ve met such scientists. Scientists like German paleontologist Günter Bechly, who thought intelligent design was bosh… until he actually read Behe and discovered that the caricature of intelligent design he had been offered wasn’t true.John G. West, “Darwinists Devolve: Review by Swamidass, Lenski, and Lents Borders on Fraud” at Evolution News and Science Today:
Well, somebody out there must think Behe worth hearing. Have a look at this string of Amazon numbers 8:00 pm EST February 11, 2019:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology
- #1 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Creationism
- #4 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Science & Religion
#1 in Developmental Biology. The book ships on February 26.
See also: Science Mag’s hit on Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves avoids his main point In these times, are you better off knowing the problems or innocently citing approved sources of misinformation as your reason for making decisions? You decide.
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I’m not a lawyer (even though I play one on TV), but is it possible to charge someone with fraud over a book review? A review, by definition, is someone’s opinion.
They argue against a straw man. They seem to think Dr. Behe accepts the fixity of species when all he is doing is arguing against the proposed mechanisms of evolution, namely natural selection. Natural selection is still the only proposed mechanism allegedly capable of producing the appearance of design. And natural selection has specific entailments, one of which the mutations are random, as in chance occurrences. They don’t understand that evolution by design is A) still evolution but B) just not blind and mindless.
Swamidass has already declared that Darwinism is dead and yet he is railing against someone arguing against Darwinism! Is he that confused?
Not one of them understands what ID claims nor what Dr. Behe is saying
ET:
“Swamidass has already declared that Darwinism is dead ”
Where did you get that information from?
I thought TE folks were in Darwin’s fans club?
Did I miss a memo lately?
🙂
So Swarmidass & co don’t devote a lot of space in a short review (less than 700 words) to one topic, and this is bordering on fraud? I think the cold weather in Seattle must have stopped Mr. West’s supply of smelling salts.
Why is Peaceful Science so poorly ranked by Alexa compared to UD? Is it because they are new in the market? Or maybe their portal background picture is not too attractive?
BTW, their website seems to have topics that aren’t exactly science related. Is that what Peaceful Science means? That anything counts as “science”, as long as they like it? I noticed they didn’t like a topic that was purely boring science but it’s hard to figure out why.
jawa,
Your comment seems totally irrelevant. Who cares about those issues you mentioned? Get serious buddy.
Bob O’H- They attack a straw man and present “evidence” that has nothing to do with what Dr. Behe is talking about. They are clueless hacks an nothing more.
Is saying that something “borders of fraud” the same as saying that something is fraud?
Could we call fraud something that is not what it seems or is represented to be?
“The UFO picture was proved to be a fraud.”
PeterA- Over on Peaceful Science Swamidass has said both Darwinism an Neo-Darwinism are dead. TEs do not accept blind watchmaker evolution.
As to, “deriding one new one as a ‘sideshow.’
Let me add to Behe’s derision of Lenski’s ‘one new one’. Richard Lenski, in his Long Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE), held that the infamous citrate adaptation he observed was a ‘new’ non-repeatable contingent event and that it was therefore undeniable proof for Darwinian evolution.
Yet, the ability to utilize citrate by e-coli is not something ‘new’, as Lenski and his Darwinian cheerleaders try to insinuate, in that E. coli already has the capability of utilizing citrate for anaerobic growth,,,
Moreover, in an experiment that Lenski did not take kindly to, Scott Minnich came along and falsified Lenski’s claim that it was a ‘new’ Darwinian event by showing that the adaptation was a predictable repeatable event and that it was therefore not a random, i.e. Darwinian, event,
Thus Lenski’s claim that the citrate adaption was something ‘new’ that provided undeniable proof for ‘random’ Darwinian evolution was in fact found to be a false claim. In fact, the repeatable nature of the citrate adaptation undercut the entire foundational base assumption of ‘randomness’ that undergirds Darwinian thought.
In other words, the base assumption of fully random mutations, which is a central foundational assumption undergirding Darwinian thought, is now known to be false.
As Denis Noble stated, “The genome is an ‘organ of the cell’, not its dictator”
And as Jonathan Wells stated, “It’s the organism controlling the DNA, not the DNA controlling the organism.”
This refusal of Darwinists to accept any empirical evidence that falsifies the base assumptions undergirding Darwinian thought is nothing new. Their are many lines of empirical evidence that undercut the foundational assumptions of Darwinian thought,,,
,, yet Darwinists continually refuse to accept falsification of their theory. This refusal to accept falsification of their theory by empirical evidence has, in reality, the effect of rendering their theory a unfalsifiable pseudoscience rather than a testable science. As Popper himself stated,
To continue on, contrary to what Darwinists constantly claim about the power of ‘random’ mutations to DNA to be the driving force of Darwinian evolution, the fact of the matter is that the basic form of any organism simply is not reducible to mutations to DNA. As Jonathan Wells states in the following article, Studies using saturation mutagenesis in the embryos of fruit flies, roundworms, zebrafish and mice also provide evidence against the idea that DNA specifies the basic form of an organism. Biologists can mutate (and indeed have mutated) a fruit fly embryo in every possible way, and they have invariably observed only three possible outcomes: a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly.
In the following video, at the 5:55 minute mark, Stephen Meyer states that ‘you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan.’
And here is a excellent powerpoint presentation by Dr. Jonathan Wells, starting around the 15:00 minute mark, showing that the central dogma of Darwinian evolution, which simply stated is “DNA makes RNA makes protein makes us”, is incorrect at every step.
Moreover, the failure of reductive materialism, which undergirds Darwinian thought, to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. Much lower than DNA itself.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
Thus, the entire reductive materialistic foundation which undergirds Darwinian thought is now shown to be false. Needless to say, this is NOT a minor falsification of the Darwinian theoretical framework
This following video goes over many more lines of evidence that clearly show that ‘biological form’ is forever beyond the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution:
Thus in conclusion, the ‘bottom up’ reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution is found to be grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form. Moreover, to state what should be glaringly obvious, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then neo-Darwinian speculations for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality.
Whereas, on the other hand, Theism, especially with recent breakthroughs in ‘non-local’, i.e. beyond space and time, quantum biology,,,
,,,is found to be very well supported in its claim that God, Who is held to be beyond space and time*, has formed each of us in our mother’s womb.
*Of note: both the Old and New Testaments, uniquely among pre-modern texts, refer to God’s activities ‘before the beginning of time’ (see for example Proverbs 8:22-23; John 1:1-3; 1 Corinthians 2:7; and 2 Timothy 1:9) …
Verses:
Supplemental note and verse:
Of course thats it! The authors say Lenski found improved function and a new function during the experiment. If thats true it demolish’s Behe’s point. Are you saying you wish they had explained more and elaborated? Well, yes, that would be nice but this was a short review. And of course Behe will have something to say about that claim. These are just the opening shots in the debate.
Lantog states:
“The authors say Lenski found improved function and a new function during the experiment. If thats true it demolish’s Behe’s point.”
Perhaps Lantog should have read post 10 before he spoke? i.e. “in an experiment that Lenski did not take kindly to, Scott Minnich came along and falsified Lenski’s claim that it was a ‘new’ Darwinian event by showing that the adaptation was a predictable repeatable event and that it was therefore not a random, i.e. Darwinian, event,” (as Lenski had falsely presupposed)
BA77,
Did Lantog miss the important memo @10?
🙂
Lantog- Intelligent Design is OK with evolution by design. Dr. Behe’s argument pertains to evolution by means of blind and mindless processes.
The important thing about Minnich’s critique is that it was published
Its funny that PS claims non teleological evolution is dead, *but* we cannot test for this scientifically. How do they know it is dead?!?
My theory about PS is proclaiming contradictions is good for their pageviews, because it’s “paradoxical” and “edgey”.
The primary argument between Darwinists and ID proponents revolves around the origination of functional information. ID proponents have empirically demonstrated that the functional sequences of information found in proteins and genes are exceeding rare to find. Whereas Darwinists basically play a ‘whack a mole’ game of pointing to a complex adaptation within an organism and claim that it is proof that Darwinian evolution can produce functional sequences of information. ID proponents subsequently get into the molecular details, i.e. whacking the mole, showing why the many adaptations that Darwinists point to is not proof that Darwinian evolution can produce functional sequences of information.
I fully expect that much of Dr. Behe’s forthcoming book will involve ‘whacking the moles’ that Darwinists have pointed to as supposed proof for Darwinian evolution and showing that those adaptations actually run directly counter to the claims of Darwinists. In other words, as the title of his book, ‘Darwin Devolves’ and as Behe’s 2010 paper, (“First Rule of Adaptive Evolution: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain”), directly imply, the vast majority of ‘moles’ that Darwinists have pointed to as supposed proof for Darwinian evolution, are actually proof that Darwinian processes are excellent at breaking preexisting functional sequences in order to gain a short term adaptive advantage. In other words, Darwinian processes are excellent at “De”volution.
Like Dr. Behe, Dr. John Sanford has also done excellent work showing that Darwinian processes are excellent at breaking preexisting functional sequences in order to gain a short term adaptive advantage. Here is a fairly recent lecture that Dr. Sanford delivered at the National Institute of Health
And here is Dr. Sanford’s main site that lists most of his papers establishing what he has termed to be the principle of “Genetic Entropy”:
Many times, what gets lost in the seemingly endless ‘whack a mole’ game between Darwinists and ID proponents is the question of the exact nature of information.
As was mentioned previously in post 11, the biological form of any particular organism is simply not reducible to the sequential information on DNA. To repeat what Stephen Meyer said, ” you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan.”
Simply put, the positional information that is somehow telling all the particles of any particular organism where to be simply is not reducible to the sequential information on DNA.
As Dr. Doug Axe states in the following video at the 1 hour 16 minute mark,
And indeed the difference between the amounts of positional information and sequential information in an organism is staggering. While the sequential information in human DNA is estimated to be around 8 billion bits of information, the positional information in a human is estimated to be around 10^32 gigabytes,,,
A more ‘conservative’ estimate of the positional information found in a human body is, “enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.”
Moreover, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, the positional information in even a one cell bacterium is found to be enormous, i.e. 10 to the 12 bits,
,,, Which is equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
Moreover, we have fairly strong evidence indicating that this enormous amount of positional information, that is telling all the atoms of the developing embryo exactly where to be, is not contained within the material particles of the developing embryo itself, as is held in the reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution, but that this enormous amount of positional information, that is telling all these atoms of the developing embryo exactly where to be, is somehow coming into the developing embryo from outside the material realm.
For instance, at about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Wells, using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, information must somehow be added to the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method.
The following article adds weight to Dr Wells assessment and states: “the process of development should be thought of as being controlled by an “algebraic structure outside space-time itself”
To provide further evidence for information coming into the developing embryo from ‘outside space-time itself’, it is also important to note that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,,,
And these quantum correlations which somehow arise from outside spacetime, are now found in molecular biology on a massive scale. In every DNA and Protein molecule,,,
Moreover, the following article points out that the unresolved enigma of protein folding, that is to say, the unresolved enigma for exactly how a protein might achieve its basic 3-dimensional form, can be easily explained if the process of folding is held to be a quantum affair.
Moreover, in the following experiment, via ‘knowledge of a particle’s position’, the researchers were able to turn information into energy.
In other words, information is now empirically shown to be a physically real entity that is separate from matter and energy. A physical real entity that has, of all things, a quote unquote ‘thermodynamic content’
These experiments demonstrating the physical reality of immaterial information have now been further refined to the point of building an ‘information engine’:
But what is most striking about this engine that is powered by immaterial information is that it is the ‘knowledge of the particle’s position’, aka Maxwell’s demon, that enables information to have an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics. As Professor Renato Renner states, “Now in information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”
Moreover, molecular machines are found to greatly outclass man-made machines in terms of efficiency, and this efficiency is found to be accomplished via quantum principles, for instance,,
Thus since “in information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.” and since the virtual 100% efficiency of molecular machines is now shown to accomplished via quantum principles, the question now becomes, “Exactly “Who” is the observer describing the systems of 100% efficient molecular machines in molecular biology?” It certainly isn’t a human observer that has “knowledge of the particle’s position”!
As a Christian, I have an answer for this profound enigma of “Who” the observer could possibly be to achieve virtually 100% thermodynamic efficiency in molecular machines, but I am sure that it is an answer that Darwinian atheists will not like one bit: