I take it the scientific community is not impressed with Behe. But what if it could be shown that simultaneous mutations had to occur routinly? Wouldn't that slow natural selection down to a point where it was questionable? Something that happens once in a thousand years now would happen once in a million years.
Wouldn't matter.
Whether life as we see it today is a 1 in 100 chance or 1 in 1,000,000, one chain of mutations is no more or less likely than others, and natural selection still works to weed out unsuccessful varieties.
Let's say you roll 100 dice simultaneously, 1000 times. The specific chain of results for each of the 100 dice over all 1000 iterations is so improbable as to be regarded as nearly impossible...but
a result is inevitable. Whichever result you end with looks nearly impossible in hindsight, but is no more or less probable than any other result, and it
did happen.
When you play the lottery, it's inevitable that eventually
someone will win, even if that specific person winning on that specific day is astronomically improbable. If you include the specific history of all past lottery winners, the probability drops even further, but the fact is that the winners still won.
So too with mutations and evolution (except of course that natural selection prevents the system from being totally random). While the exact variety and history of life that we see looks massively improbable in hindsight,
a result was inevitable. This happens to be the one that happened. If a different result had come about, that result would have been exactly as improbable as this one.
Improbability is not the same as impossibility, which is why Behe is commonly considered to be an idiot.
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