Behe on Lessons From the Polar Bear Studies

[Patrick]

Hey @nlents, Behe called you a Lesser-Known.

Echoing blogged arguments by his lesser-known co-authors of the appalling review of my book in Science ,

And then Behe quotes @NLENTS without saying your name:

(One of Lenski’s co-reviewers actually talked himself into thinkingthat “it is entirely possible that none of the 17 most positively selected genes in polar bears are ‘damaged.’” Now there’s a great opportunity for someone to make a few dollars with a friendly wager.)

Here is the Behe’s very scientific response:

I’d like to highlight one final critical point. Let me set it up with a homey analogy. When I was 14 I worked weekends at McDonald’s, and sometimes I’d be assigned to operate the milkshake machine. The machine was broken down each night for cleaning. One of my tasks early in the morning before opening was to reassemble its parts. There were maybe a dozen parts to put together — sprockets, clamps, gaskets, and such. Shakes were very popular back then (mid 1960s) and made many customers happy for a while. Nonetheless, the function of the parts of a shake machine is not “to make people happy.” The function of a sprocket or a clamp isn’t even “to make a milkshake.” Rather, they have lower-level mechanical duties that are subservient to the overarching higher purposes of the systems.

From the above I am sure that Behe upon retirement from Lehigh University can get his old job back at any of the area’s McDonald’s and see that the shake machines have evolved considerably in complexity but the milkshakes that they make will still make you fat and only increases your bad cholesterol.