Michael Behe responds to the hit pre-publication review at Science

Which was clearly intended to muddy the waters:

For readers who don’t have time to plow all the way through, here are the take-home lessons:

– gene-level counter-examples cited by the reviewers are shamelessly question-begging; the reviewers simply gesture at genes and assume they were produced and/or integrated into living systems by random processes, but neither the reviewers nor anyone else has even tried to show that is possible;

– organ-level counter-examples cited by the reviewers as produced by exaptive processes are similarly question-begging; criticisms of my earlier books cited by the reviewers were similarly question-begging and/or relied on vague, imaginative stories;

– the reviewers are either unaware of or ignore my many detailed replies to earlier criticisms and to papers the reviewers themselves cite;

– as noted in my previous post, the reviewers don’t even attempt to grapple with the main argument of the book, that beneficial degradative mutations will rapidly, relentlessly, unavoidably, outcompete beneficial constructive mutations at every time and population scale. Michael Behe, “Train Wreck of a Review: A Response to Lenski et al. in Science” at Evolution News and Science Today

The thing is, a great many people are only looking for a half-baked reason to dismiss the book. Swamidass et al. provided them with one.

The fact that the attack is incompetent is its strength, not its weakness. It shows the social power of Darwinism, irrespective of intellectual force. Most Science readers will probably go with social power. It gives them the right to sneer, right or wrong. Intellectual force requires a basis.

Note: Social power is a form of living on capital. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

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See also: Some thoughts on the hatchet review of Behe’s Darwin Devolves in Science One wonders, do many biologists have independent ideas that Darwinism stifles? If so, they must be frustrated by the need to keep them under wraps or defend them from malign mediocrities for whom mere orthodoxy produces a living.

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.

and

All together now, Dissenters: Happy Birthday, Darwin! Folks, it’s Darwin Day, when we are told by Darwinians to celebrate “intellectual bravery.” Very well, here is some: Dissent from Darwinism, the vid.