Behe and blood clotting

One of the problems with playing a "God of the Gaps" game in areas of current research is that gaps are liable to tighten or close around the player as research progresses. In this case, I should say "Intelligent Designer of the Gaps", as the player concerned is Michael Behe, one of the I.D. movement's few biologists, and the best known of them.One of Behe's examples of supposedly un-evolvable irreducibly complex systems is the mammalian blood clotting system. His problem with this was the research of evolutionary biologist Russell Doolittle, who already had a good hypothesis as to how the clotting system arose when Dr. Behe first made his claim in the book Darwin's Black Box (1996).Dr. Doolittle has been doing a lot since then in his area of research, and many of you will know that he had established that bony fish had a simpler version of our clotting system, thus throwing the "irreducibly complex" claim into doubt, several tears ago (2003).More recently, his team has established that jawless fish like the Lamprey have even simpler versions. So, what's happening is that clotting systems of ever decreasing complexity are being found as the genomes of simpler organisms are unravelled, and evidence of some of the steps of the evolution of the mammalian system is being revealed. It's similar to the way that the evolution of our eyes has been illustrated by looking at the eyes of distantly related organisms which retained simpler versions.Bad news for Behe.I owe most of this (including the illustration) to an excellent article by Ian Musgrave on Panda's Thumb, for those who want more detail. Here.Diagram shows decreasing complexity in three clotting systems.Musgrave predicts a further decrease in Amphioxus, a simple, pre-vertebrate chordate, and recommends (tongue in cheek) that Behe and the I.D. people check out its clotting system before someone else does.Incidentally, the two missing parts in the Lamprey's clotting system would both cause haemophilia in us, which is why Behe claimed that they had to be included in all such clotting systems. No problem for the Lamprey, though.So, for discussion here is whether or not anyone thinks that this is a serious embarrassment for Behe and I.D.I do. We've all noticed his claims about "irreducible complexity" being a central plank of the creationist platform. Will they keep it up, or slip quietly on to looking for new gaps for their God/designer? Intelligent Design, if this passes, AdminsEdited by Admin, : Reduce image size.

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