"The Edge of Evolution" by Michael Behe

I can't think of any offhand. But then I lack the boundless creationist capacity for making stuff up.In particular, returning to the topic of this thread, the observation that malaria parasites evolve resistance to antimalarial drugs is not evidence against evolution, and Behe's trivial blunder will not make it so.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This article doesn't show White saying anything like what Behe's saying, it just tells us who he is.Based on White's impressive biography, I am fairly sure that he wouldn't overlook the role that natural selection plays in evolution.

No, of course not.But as your goal is not to clarify things for others, but to muddle and confuse yourself, let me congratulate you on your post.

Don't be silly. Good grief, are you still being wrong about that?

No. I guess we'll just have to settle for observing them, then. Fortunately they're so abundant that this is very easy to do.---You might consider reading what Kimura wrote someday. Of course, this would inhibit your ability to talk arrant nonsense about this subject.

But no-one does, in fact, believe that it "explains biological evolution". It is therefore a ludicrous fantasy to postulate its purpose was to induce such a belief.In particular, anyone who's bothered to read Dawkins' book would know that its sole purpose is to illustrate one very simple and very obvious point: so simple that a bright child could understand it and so obvious that you'd have to be a creationist to miss it.Your ability to misunderstand it so grossly and so continuously doubtless makes you a king amongst creationists. Round here, though, it simply makes you contemptible.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : it's / its typo

So you really don't understand what Dawkins is talking about at all? According to the hypothesis of parallel universes, there does indeed exist an alternative spacetime continuum in which creationists have the basic intelligence and integrity to research the subjects that they bloviate about.So much for the hypothesis of parallel universes.

I was looking at Behe's Edge of Evolution again. I might go through it bit by bit if I can be bothered, but in the meantime the following is perhaps a fair sample of his thought, displaying as it does an amusing inability not only to understand the ideas of his opponents, but also to understand his own ideas, or the consequences thereof. Here he is discussing medicines which require multiple simultaneous mutations on the part of their target organisms to produce resistance: (Emphasis and ellipses are as in the original.)Now, where to start with this farrago of nonsense?First, let's observe that evolutionary medicine is in fact practiced (AFAIK) exclusively by evolutionists. Indeed, this paragraph comes just after Behe's description of an experiment in E.M. carried out by Barry Hall, a fierce critic of Behe, of ID, and of Behe's blather about "irreducible complexity". The "Darwinists" aren't "counseling despair" in the development of such drugs, they're the people developing them while the ID crowd sit on their useless arses whining about Darwinists.But of course, he isn't complaining about real Darwinists who actually exist, but the "consistent Darwinists" who think what he thinks they ought to think, rather than what all Darwinists everywhere actually do think. Let's look at what he thinks they should think: But a "consistent Darwinist" only thinks that that must happen "eventually" in the same sense that Behe would be forced to admit it himself. It is of course true that if something has a one-in-quadrillion chance of happening per year, then after a quadrillion years it is likely to have happened, and even Behe must admit this; but this is not particularly a "counsel of despair", since a drug for which the time to develop resistance was a quadrillion years would in fact be a hopeful development. The consistent Darwinist in fact thinks that if you produce a medicine for which an extremely long shot is required for resistance, then the expected time for this long shot to come off is itself long.But Behe wants his "consistent Darwinist" to think something different from the bleedin' obvious thing they do in fact think, and here's how he implies this untruth: But of course the consistent Darwinist does not think, and never says, and indeed flatly and repeatedly denies, that this molecular machinery was formed by the repeated coming off of extremely long shots. Rather, the point on which they disagree with Behe is that lots of simultaneous changes in the genome were required for the formation of this machinery. He says that they were, and infers a designer, they say that they weren't, and that the machinery can be produced by ordinary stepwise Darwinian processes.Hence in order to be consistent, Darwinists must in fact agree that if we can make evolution of resistance to a drug into a long shot requiring many simultaneous mutations, then a long shot is in fact what it will be. Which is why they do in fact develop drug therapies based on this solidly Darwinian principle.This, is, then, a sad misrepresentation of the "consistent Darwinist". Let Behe, if he can, expound his own ideas, but he should not attempt to speak either for Darwinists or for people who are consistent, since he evidently has no idea what they think or why they think it.Behe's own consistency, or rather lack thereof, is shown in the penultimate sentence, where he loses his grip on his own ideas, and writes: Now, let's remember that Behe believes in evolution strictu sensu (i.e. descent with modification). He thinks that his Designer has been intelligently intervening throughout the history of life (not just "in the beginning" as an orthodox creationist would have it) to ensure that long shots, exceedingly unlikely to be caused by chance, do in fact come off again and again by design.So where is the "real hope" that remains to us if such a Designer exists? We can make an antimalarial drug that would require a zillion-to-one shot for the development of resistance --- at which point Behe's Designer can intelligently and purposefully tinker with malaria to make the zillion-to-one shot come off, actuated by the same consuming hatred of humanity that led him to invent malaria in the first place. To be consistent, Behe must postulate a Designer with both the ability to bring this about and a desire that people should die of malaria. The only way we could have "real hope" for the success of such medicines is to ascertain that the Designer is dead --- or, if he's still alive, to hunt him down and kill him.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.