Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

Michael Behe

A striking admission that Michael Behe was right

What he is saying is precisely Behe’s point in Darwin Devolves. Cell evolution is mostly about destroying complex equipment that hinders immediate survival. (The question of how the equipment came to be so complex beforehand is separate from the question of what life forms actually do when they evolve.) Read More ›

Karsten Pultz: A motorhead looks at design in nature

Karsten Pultz: I’m sure if Behe had asked any of the mechanics there at the garage, what they thought about the neoDarwinian hypothesis that complex machinery can be produced by random processes, they would have answered that such an idea is extremely silly, if not right out ludicrous. Read More ›

Jerry Coyne jumps into the Dawkins eugenics row

Contrary to Coyne's and Dawkin's claims, dog breeding is DEvolution for dogs. It usually works that way, as Michael Behe points out in Darwin Devolves. Dogs are bred by humans at the expense of their genetic health. Read More ›

Michael Behe: There are no “trenchant” criticisms of ID

The complexity is that Darwinism sticks deeply in the heads of shallow people. It explains everything, especially the sociology of their personal lives. Which is what really matters. So trenchant criticisms generally don’t really happen much though outbreaks of rage often do. Read More ›

Matzke is Back on the Flagellum Horse

In October 2006, Nick Matzke, a name not unfamiliar to denizens of UD, and Mark Pallen co-authored a review article for Nature Review of Microbiology regarding the status of research into the evolutionary origins of the bacterial flagellum.  Matzke and Pallen felt the need to write such an article because since the publication of Michael Behe’s book “Darwin’s Black Box” ten years prior, there had been much hand waving and hand wringing over exactly what is the evolutionary explanation for the seemingly irreducibly complex flagellar system.  Matzke’s first line of attack prior to the ’06 article was to lurk various discussion threads and offer up lists of studies that supposedly provided the very thing that Behe said was nowhere to Read More ›

Behe vindicated by goldfish? But of course!

We see devolution all the time with unintelligent causes. Animals gnaw a hole in the bottom of a jug of water and they get some water but the rest is wasted. They destroy the feedhouse door trying to get into the feed because they don’t know how to use the doorhandle. They do get fed but the feed is scattered and much is wasted. *That’s what an unintelligent cause is typically like.* Put another way, the animals won’t learn to use the doorhandle or the jug cap. But just to survive and reproduce, they might not need to. Read More ›

Behe was right: Bacteria eject flagella to avoid starvation

Here’s an example of what Michael Behe is (actually) talking about in Darwin Devolves The evolution strategy “Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain”: Eleven authors writing in PLOS Biology found that “γ-proteobacteria eject their polar flagella under nutrient depletion, retaining flagellar motor relic structures.” When there’s nothing to eat, these bacteria are willing to toss off their flagella and plug the hole in order to save energy. If you were out on a lake, would you unlatch your new Yamaha F250 4.2-liter V6 outboard motor and let it drop to the bottom? You might if the boat was taking on water and was about to sink, and you were about to Read More ›