Medical engineer Rob Stadler offers some thoughts on the recent report from Lehigh University, which seems to vindicate, without citing, Michael Behe’s thesis in Darwin Devolves:
A powerful piece of ID irony has just been published, and we simply cannot allow it to pass unnoticed.
This paper:
Demonstrates by experimental evolution that evolution actually favors devolution — resulting in a less fit organism. [For me, experimental evolution provides the highest level of confidence among all evidence for evolution, because it is repeatable, is directly observable, and is prospectively designed, therefore making it possible to reduce the influence of bias and assumptions.]
Where did this paper come from? The Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University.
So, you think, it must have come from our own Mike Behe — that would only make sense. But no, this paper was authored by those who oppose Mike at his own university!
Remember, these same authors wrote a scathing review of Darwin Devolves in the journal Evolution.
Now, somehow, they must hold their position of opposing Darwin Devolves, while presenting compelling evidence to support Darwin Devolves. Quite a conundrum!
An editorial was also published. The editorial attempts to tiptoe through this same conundrum.
It starts with:
It is hard to ignore the sense that life has purpose. This idea — known as teleology — is central to religious thinking. However, it is also found in many areas of human culture and scholarship that one might expect to be free from divine influence. These other areas include, somewhat surprisingly, the study of evolution.
But of course, they must pay homage to Darwin:
Consider eyes, organs so complex that they fool some into thinking they must have been designed by a creator.
And yet, they must admit that Darwin Devolves:
Now, in eLife, Sean Buskirk, Alecia Rokes and Greg Lang report the results of experiments confirming that natural selection can sometimes result in a reduction of fitness…
How do we know it is only “sometimes?”
Rob Stadler and Change Laura Tan are the authors of Stairway to Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check and Stadler is also the author of The Scientific Approach to Evolution: What they didn’t teach you in biology
See also: Behe vindicated (still not cited) at his own LeHigh University. One might ask: If things go downhill that way and “directionality and progress in evolution may be illusory,” what is the source of intelligent designs? An intelligence in or beyond nature? We’ll take either as an answer, to start a discussion.
and
This same week we learned: At Nature Heredity Mike Behe vindicated but not cited At Nature Heredity: Discoveries during the subsequent two decades have continued to support the idea that loss of function contributes to adaptation (Murray 2020), with cases of adaptive or beneficial loss of function being discovered across diverse organisms, genes, traits, and environments.”