Behe and Hunt: Irreducible Complexity and Numerology

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@Art

Doesn’t this sound sort of circular? Anyways, how would one determine this, without assuming the conclusion Behe wishes to draw?

Raises a really interesting point. Consider @colewd’s falsification study…

@colewd

If a flagellum was produced in the lab with lots of bacterial replication and knockout of the DNA repair mechanisms then his claim is toast if you can show a mutational path to the functional flagellum.

Let’s imagine this happened. I’m pretty sure Behe would respond the same way…

@colewd

— The ability of a random sequence of DNA to form a [flagellum] when transcribed beggars belief. It would not be expected to happen in many, many tries. That alone makes it seem very likely that the sequence was not random.

After all, why not just suppose that God directly reached into the experiment to make a flagellum? Why suppose that the non-coding DNA was designed to evolve into a flagellum?

It seems that the argument is merely from incredulity, based on a strong assumption that complex proteins can’t evolve. If they do, it “beggars belief.” Honestly, it really seems to beg the question instead.