In the Old West, in the days of the Pony Express, information could not be transferred more rapidly than a horse could gallop. Then came the telegraph. Bank robbers could no longer escape to nearby towns without the residents having been informed in advance, at the speed of light in Morse Code.
Then came wireless communication. It was no longer necessary to lay out telegraph or telephone lines. Information could be transferred at the speed of light to Neil Armstrong on the moon.
Then came the blogosphere. At the speed of a URL click, one can check up on references. Literature bluffing is no longer a viable tactic in a debate. Bluffers can no longer escape to a nearby town without being intercepted before they get there.
Michael Behe was instrumental in making the Darwinian literature-bluffing tactic public.
Behe was assured by those in his field that the biochemical evolutionary literature was replete with detailed explanations of how his proposed irreducibly complex biochemical systems could be accounted for in Darwinian terms. But when he checked the literature he discovered that not only were there no detailed explanations, there were not even any speculations. The question had essentially never been addressed by the scientific community in his discipline. The Darwinian thesis had been assumed from the outset, never questioned, and never rigorously investigated. In fact, it had not been investigated at all.
Judge Jones fell prey to literature bluffing. (Actually, he fell prey to indirect hearsay literature bluffing.) Jones apparently believes that Behe’s irreducible-complexity challenge to Darwinian mechanisms has been refuted by the “scientific” community, when in fact those “refutations” amount to nothing more than storytelling based on nonexistent evidence and demonstrably faulty reasoning. Check out my UD essay on that subject here.