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Michael Behe Lecture Recommend

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Check out this lecture by Michael Behe about his book, The Edge of Evolution.

Two questions posed by members of the audience were of interest to me. Sean Carroll criticized Behe in a review of The Edge for not considering cumulative, sequential mutations, and Carroll used a specific example. Behe points out in the lecture that this specific example was addressed in his book, and that the subject of cumulative selection was addressed in detail. Behe goes on to speak about the resistance of “science” publications to print his rejoinders to his critics, and that the editors often say something like, “Your response would not be of interest to our readers.”

Really? Pointing out flagrant misrepresentations — might I even suggest lies, or evidence that the book reviewer did not even read the book? — would not be of interest to our readers?

This is the tyrannical Darwinian way: Suppress dissent. Vilify the opponent. Tell the population that the matter is settled, and that those who question are evil destroyers of “science.”

These tactics sound more like those of a depraved theocracy than those of a truth-seeking “scientific” establishment.

The other interesting question posed by a member of the audience — after Behe presented his probabilistic, empirical evaluation of the mutational factors required to defeat chloroquine by the malarial parasite — concerned the human population of the earth, the fact that it is currently about six billion, and that this represents about half of all humans who have ever lived since “Lucy” presumably evolved into modern humans through the now-indisputable mechanism of random mutation and natural selection.

The probabilistic resources have never existed for the Darwinian mechanism to do anything of any significance — except break things that can promote survival in a pathological environment — and this should be obvious to anyone who has not been blinded by Darwinian anti-logic.

Comments
Corrected link to Hitchens CNN interview: Author Hitchens on cancer, atheism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-mo6HVib6kbornagain77
August 8, 2010
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Gil though off topic, I think this article may be of strong interest for you since you were a 'militant' atheist yourself: Former Atheist: Christianity Really Does Make Sense http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100802/formeratheist-christianity-really-does-make-sense/index.html also of interest from the same issue: Hitchens Certain He Won't Turn to God while Lucid Excerpt: Nearly two months after being diagnosed with cancer and undergoing chemotherapy, famed atheist Christopher Hitchens has lost much of his hair but his unbelief remains intact. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100807/hitchens-certain-he-wont-turn-to-god-while-lucid/index.html of note a CNN interview with Hitchens is linked in the articlebornagain77
August 8, 2010
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Gil: Re: These tactics sound more like those of a depraved theocracy ATHEOCRACY than those of a truth-seeking “scientific” establishment. There, fixed it . . . Gkairosfocus
August 8, 2010
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A Wikipedia article includes the following:
A dramatic population bottleneck is theorized for the period around 70,000 BCE (see Toba catastrophe theory). After this time and until the development of agriculture, it is estimated that the world population stabilized at about one million people whose subsistence entailed hunting and foraging...
Assuming this is correct, it means that during almost the entire history of human evolution there were no more than a million individuals at any given time. Try evolving chloroquine resistance with that.GilDodgen
August 8, 2010
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I love the quote by Dr. Behe at approximately the 46 minute mark, in which he states: Again I would like to emphasize, I'm not arguing Darwinism cannot make complex functional systems, the data on malaria, and the other examples, are a observation that it does not. In science observation beats theory all the time. So Professor Dawkins can speculate about what he thinks Darwinian processes could do, but in nature Darwinian processes have not been shown to do anything in particular.bornagain77
August 8, 2010
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Oops. Sorry about that. I hit the send button by accident. As I was saying, that is down from the peak of over 2% in the early 60's. At 2% growth rate, the world population would double every 35 years! Even at 1.14%, it would double every 61 years. Even allowing for the population to double every couple hundred years, we should have had many more than 200 billion people on this earth and the current population should be multiples of where it is today. If evolution is true, where are all the bones? Where have all the people gone?tjm
August 8, 2010
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This article brings up an interesting problem that evolutionists must face. Why are there so few buried bones? OK, let's be generous and allow for a total population of 200 billion people since the beginning of the human population. Where are all the bones? There should be literally billions of them and very few are found. I wonder what the proposed population growth rate of humans is since they evolved. The current growth rate is said to be about 1.14% and that is down from the peak of over 2tjm
August 8, 2010
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It took 100 billion billion malarial parasites to evolve two amino-acid substitutions in order to defeat chloroquine, so even if the total cumulative human population has been 100 billion, you're still a billion times short. Then take into account how many mutations it would take to turn Lucy into Mike Behe, and the absurdity of the Darwinian proposition becomes obvious. Also, note Behe's comments about how Carroll claims that it has been demonstrated that protein-protein binding sites can evolve by Darwinian mechanisms and references two papers, which when read demonstrate nothing of the sort. They only compare protein sequences. Carroll just assumes that Darwinian mechanisms produced them, and then claims that this is a demonstration.GilDodgen
August 7, 2010
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It doesn't change the argument much, but the total cumulative population of the world has been estimated anywhere from 50-100 billion, and even higher, no 12 billion as suggested above, though I'd be happy to see the evidence for the lower number.SCheesman
August 7, 2010
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