From the article in the opening post:
It appears that this is exactly what Behe did with the polar bear apoB data. He exaggerates the functional predictions, and takes those qualified predictions and makes them into absolutes. Hoisting and petards comes to mind.
Exactly - this is a remarkably concise description of 95% of ID rhetoric.
This is an interesting sentence to parse, which Behe appears to be defending:
Since few experiments can be done with grumpy polar bears, they analyzed the changes by computer. They determined that the mutations were very likely to be damaging — that is, likely to degrade or destroy the function of the protein that the gene codes for.
Take the first sentence:
Since few experiments can be done with grumpy polar bears, they analyzed the changes by computer.
Well, this is true. Take the second sentence:
They determined that the mutations were very likely to be damaging — that is, likely to degrade or destroy the function of the protein that the gene codes for.
Who is the “They”? Clearly the researchers that published the polar bear article. What is clear from @Art’s quotes in the article (and @NLENTS), is that “They” did not determine them to be damaging. The table of discussion is one piece of data that was combined with others to conclude otherwise.
A much more troubling problem is that he does not even link to your article @Art (and some guy named @NLENTS). That is a problem.
I am “he that need not be named” and it is @art that is “some other guy.” Swamidass escaped this time. But anyway, somehow, it’s mostly aimed at Jerry Coyne, hahaha. As Art put it, that post was an auto-goal. I would have said unforced error, but whichever sports analogy you like, it’s bad. Two lies, but let’s also keep in mind that he doesn’t even try to defend the position that started this post. His reading of the Liu paper is almost completely backwards. The weight of the evidence is strongly on the side that most of those missense - maybe all of them - improve the function of apoB, at least in the context of clearing cholesterol from the blood. That’s what this is about and he doesn’t even go there.
I think it is because they did not want to link to your article, because your article essentially rebuts his response to Coyne.
That’s a good point. But he does link to it later in the article. So he does a block quote of me in one place, but a block quote of Coyne paraphrasing me in another. Whichever way suits the point he’s trying so hard to make.
You beat me to this! I’m going to tweet this and tag everyone at the DI.
It’s also odd how Behe seems to be walking back the entire argument. Towards the end of the article he describes the following quote as a misrepresentation of his argument:
If that isn’t his argument, then is Behe saying that unguided mutations can improve the function of genes instead of breaking or damaging them? If so, what is the point of his book?
To be honest, I’m a more concerned that he cut out all the variants predicted to be benign, merely focusing on the HDivPred results is at least defensible.
Surely his argument is that the vast majority of helpful unguided mutations “harm” the genes, to the extent that evolution can’t be fuelled by unguided mutations because they would be incapable of “building” anything new.
Could you clarify what you mean? Are you saying that he also cut out some of the rows, not just columns?
Yeah, you can see in my screenshot, or in Behe’s ENV post - he only includes rows that have the prediction “possibly damaging” or “probably damaging”.
WHAT?? I didn’t even look! When am I going to learn not to take anything at face value?!
I know, I was pretty amazed when I noticed too. It’s rare that they’re so obvious with their dodgy tactics.
From the looks of it, he had to go out of his way to make his table in such a way that it preserved the alphabetical order of the gene names. The table wasn’t simply sorted in order of predictions and then only one half copied and pasted: Behe had to explicitly go through and only copy and paste the rows with the prediction “damaging”, leaving the rest behind.
That’s what it looks like. WOW, this is incredibly dishonest. My figure is like all red now! lol
But this is all beside the point. He said the original authors concluded they were damaging. They did not. Full stop.
I’m about to tweet this out. Feel free to retweet and add your comments.
