But maybe this is the main point: Here is @Giltil once again making the exact same claim, as if that entire discussion never happened, with many of the same people who were involved in that earlier thread.
If is baffling to try understand how a person does this.
My sense is that there are two rules which underlie much of this. These rules make sense only if you are not actually curious about reality, but are concerned with winning arguments where you defend your view of reality.
Rule 1: My obstinacy is victory. The object of argument is to convince me. If I am not convinced, I win.
Rule 2: My ignorance is the best preservative for my obstinacy. If I learn things, these things may alter my views. Therefore, best to learn nothing, so that I will never need to concede any ground, anywhere.
Successful self-portrait
My claim is that Behe is the first to have reviewed in such a systematic way the typology of molecular changes underlying adaptations observed in 4 decades of evolutionary experiments with microbes. If you contest that claim, it is your task to cite a review predating 2010 doing the same thing rather than my task to show you that such a review doesn’t exist, for it is well known that proving a negative is often a formidable if not impossible task. Common, be brave, go and look for this review which, if it exists, should not be difficult to find.
No one is questioning that Bebe wrote a systematic review. He did. The question is of Bebe contributed original thought.
You and Behe have already shown that you will label any beneficial mutations with no degradative effects as the product of intelligent design and not as the product of evolution simply because they are beneficial without being degradative.
If true, good for him. He managed to do something well within the capabilities of any not particularly bright Masters student. That, of course, makes him the equivalent of a multiple Nobel Prize winner among ID Creationists.
I actually think he did(maybe, if one doesn’t think Sanford is actually first with that idea). I think they’re similar enough that I’d probably have to give Sanford the credit, and I’m sure Behe was aware of Sanford before he came up with his devolution stuff. The idea that evolution works first and foremost by a process that breaks things more often than it invents things, and that the reverse never happens(or never enough to reverse the net effect of indefinite loss), is his idea and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone say that before him.
It’s just that the inference from those lab-experiments is a hasty generalization fallacy, and he neglects to consider both the effect of environment and ecological niche, and the long-term effects of purifying selection when he generalizes a few months or years lab evolution of microorganisms, to all of natural history. The problem with his idea is not really it’s originality. Essentially he’s trying a sort of inductive generalization, but he does not consider all the relevant evidence.
Lab experiments in contrast to natural environments are essentially always extremely simple, are constant rather than fluctuating, and selection is almost always for competitive growth rate rather than survival. Anyone who doesn’t think this matters or makes a difference does not know what they’re talking about.
A quick search shows that “first rule of adaptive evolution” is primarily repeated by the DI and Behe himself, and NOT the 100+ articles citing this review. Rather than “not getting credit”, this may be another case of seeking credit where it is not deserved, something the DI has been known to do in the past.
Also this, which has likely been posted here already.
And for that claim to have any purpose other than deception, you would have read, understood, and objectively eliminated a large number of potential exceptions to your claim.
So, how many?
I’m not demanding that you prove your negative claim, just support it.
How many reviews did you read before deciding that Behe’s was the first?
I will, if you’re brave enough to dig into the mechanism underlying somatic hypermutation and explain how it was intelligently designed.
Hint: you won’t find any detail in @gpuccio’s ramblings.
Hint: @gpuccio is omitting something so basic that it’s prominent in the Wikipedia article on somatic hypermutation.
That’s a nice article. And it certainly does a good job of pointing out how dishonest Behe’s approach is. I also like the coining of the term “neo-creationist,” which might solve some arguments about whether Behe is a creationist in the strictest imaginable sense or only in the ordinary sense of the word.
I think it is also worth returning to this review of Darwin Devolves, by Behe’s own Lehigh colleagues:
It does a good job of establishing the book in the context of Behe’s 2010 article:
The “First Rule” appeared in a 2010 review in the Quarterly Review of Biology (Behe 2010), largely as a critique of the field of experimental evolution, which has grown dramatically in the last 20 years (see reviews by Fisher and Lang 2016; Lenski 2017; Van den Bergh et al. 2018). Collectively, experimental evolution has yielded new insights into the tempo of genotypic and phenotypic adaptation (Barrick et al. 2009), the role of historical contingency in the evolution of new traits (Blount et al. 2008), second-order selection on mutator alleles (Sniegowski et al. 1997), the power of sex to combine favorable (and purge deleterious) mutations (McDonald et al. 2016), the dynamics of adaptation (Lang et al. 2013; Good et al. 2017), and the seemingly unlimited potential of adaptive evolution (Wiser et al. 2013).
Makes the point that by concentrating on experimental evolution of microorganisms, Behe’s article gave a “misleading” impression of evolution more generally:
Behe gives a misleading account of experimental evolution by trumpeting each and every loss-of-function mutation that provides a selective advantage. In truth, loss-of-function mutations are expected to contribute disproportionately to adaptation in experimental evolution, where selective pressures are high and conditions are constant, or nearly so. Systematic studies in yeast and bacteria show that most genes can be deleted singly with little functional consequence (Giaever et al. 2002; Winzeler 1999) and that a number of gene deletions are beneficial in specific environments (Hottes et al. 2004; Pir et al. 2012; Novo et al. 2013). It is important to point out that these mutations are often pleiotropic (Qian et al. 2012) and are not necessarily beneficial outside of the defined conditions of the experiment. No deletion is beneficial in all environments and beneficial loss-of-function mutations that arise in experimental evolution are unlikely to succeed if, say, cells are required to mate (Lang et al. 2009), the static environment is disturbed (Frenkel et al. 2015), or glucose is temporarily depleted (Li et al. 2018). Yet, Behe rests his central premise on the weak claim that these data demonstrate the ineffectiveness of random mutation and natural selection in all situations.
And suggests that in his book Behe further exaggerates this misapprehension:
After reading Darwin Devolves, one would be forgiven for expecting that loss-of-function mutations swamp out all other forms of genetic variation no matter the context. After all, Behe states that “random mutation and natural selection are in fact fiercely devolutionary (p10),” and degrading mutations are “relentless as the tide and as futile to try to resist (p186).” However, the truth is that loss-of-function mutations account for only a small fraction of natural genetic variation. In humans only 3.5% of exonic and splice site variants (57,137 out of 1,639,223) are putatively loss- of-function (Saleheen et al. 2017), and a survey of 42 yeast strains found that only 242 of the nearly 6000 genes contain putative loss- of-function variants (Bergstrom et al. 2014). Compared to the vast majority of natural genetic variants, loss-of-function variants have a much lower allele-frequency distribution (MacArthur et al. 2012). Still, Behe fixates on beneficial loss-of-function mutations, drawing heavily from situations where one expects such mutations to be favored—such as experimental evolution—and generalizes to all situations this one mechanism writ large.
There’s a lot more in the review that is cogent, but I’ve quoted from them enough.
He really is a bizarre character and there are times when it’s hard to know what to make of him. Sometimes he seems rather like his own innocent dupe – Henry Higgins, engaged in producing a deception by taking plain, dirty creationism, teaching it some fancy speech and dressing it up, only to follow this by falling in love with the product of his own labors.
And what is the outcome of all of this work? The man has done a splendid job of rendering himself ridiculous, a joke to all who know his story. His role as the one person connected with creationism who had any scientific credibility at all led to his follow-on role as the star witness for the-creationism-that-dare-not-speak-its-name in Kitzmiller, and in that role he produced the astrology gaffe, the hideous joke uttered in all dead earnest that killed any possibility that a judge who could read books and had gone to college would rule in his favor.
That the case made in Darwin Devolves takes a dishonestly selective approach to the evidence is of course well established, but I found his other weird methods in that book to be problematic, too: for example, taking adaptations in highly constrained environments to represent the limit of what evolution could do, while pointing to other things evolution had done, e.g., the Cambrian explosion, and insisting that the limits established by these other adaptations made those impossible. Why not take the fastest adaptive radiations in history to show what evolution could do? Why take the arguably “slow” ones as setting the speed limit, and declare the “fast” ones impossible? On what empirical basis could this man possibly claim that the Cambrian explosion required the Fickle Finger of Fate to come down out of the Laugh-In Set, in its Divine Glory, to create diversity and disparity?
I suppose that sooner or later it will turn out that he has a fourth book in him, “Darwin was a Poopyhead,” or some such thing, and it will likely have the same impact upon biological study the others have had. He will probably hold more book launches like the one he held here in Seattle where he insisted that none of the critics have ever laid a glove on him. And he will continue in his role of High Priest to the uncultured, the ignorant and the easily-deceived.
Achilles thought it would be better to be the lowliest slave on earth than to rule all of Hades. Behe, plainly, thinks otherwise, and is happy to take the crown of this particular underworld.
No. Behe recognizes that simple gain of function mutations can occur and spread in the population through darwinian mechanism. He even cites several examples of these. But because they are overwhelmed by adaptive degradative mutations, he concludes, rightly IMHO, that they cannot explain creative/constructive evolution exemplified by complex molecular machines.
He hasn’t shown that. If you view this as a fact, please support it with evidence, not with hearsay.
It is easy to get lost in the weeds of the specific scientific errors and misrepresentations that Behe makes, and I suspect that is no accident on Behe’s part. Do you have any expectation whatsoever that @Giltil will comprehend that article, if he even reads it to begin with?
However, it is also typical of Behe that when you step back and look at the bare basics of his argument, it simply does not stand up to logical scrutiny even if his claims regarding the data were correct. And this is no exception. Here is how I understand the argument of his book (based, I admit, not on reading the book itself, but on his own description of the argument and those provided by those who have read it.)
A mutation could be described as “degradative” for a number of reasons. One reason would be if it reduced the fitness of the organism, thru whatever means. However, this is not how Behe is using the term, at least at first. Rather, he means it specifically in terms of the function performed by the gene before the mutation. A degradative mutation, in these sense, will cause this function to be performed less effectively compared to the original, unmutated gene or to cause the function to cease altogether. Often, if not usually, such a mutation will also be degradative in the first sense mentioned: It will reduce the fitness of the organism. However, it is also possible that such a “degradative” mutation will lead to the organism being able to perform a new function, or perform an existing function better, so that the overall fitness of the organism is now improved. Such a mutation would therefore be favoured by natural selection.
Behe’s argument seems to be that the overwhelming majority of new functional genes are “degradative” in this 2nd sense. And he may well be right, I don’t honestly know. And if he is correct, then it is also true that the genome of an organism will eventually be dominated by genes that are in a “degraded” state compared to their ancestral form.
And this is where the bait and switch occurs: Behe now expects his reader to think of “degradative” mutations in the first sense that was mentioned. That is to say, he expects the reader to presume that the accumulation of all these “degradative” mutations will inevitably lead to degradation of the organism itself. But why would this happen? If every single one of these mutations were beneficial in terms of their fitness effect individually, then there is no reason to believe that their cumulative effect would be detrimental. The only reason to think this would be if one forgets the meaning we have been attributing to the term “degradative” throughout the discussion and suddenly reverts to automatically thinking of “degraded” as “bad.”
It is nothing but a very silly and transparent word game. But his followers are always easily fooled.
That’s my take, anyway. If anyone has read the book and notices that I got anything wrong, please let me know.
So Behe is fine with inferring that “devolution” occurred naturally by comparisons of the genomes of different species (with a rooted phylogeny), but he would reject that gains in genes/functions occurred naturally if we can show that with a phylogeny too? Do I have that correct?
So you assume environmental complexity doesn’t make a difference(somehow you can beneficially lose genes encoding enzymes that act on carbon sources still present in your environment, or lose genes that give tolerance to higher and lower temperatures in an environment where the temperature fluctuates between extremes rather than remaining constant at your growth optimum), that selection for survival(ability to form biofilms, or produce spores, or switch between different metabolic pathways, regulate cell wall thickness etc.) rather than growth rate also makes no difference, and that there’s no “floor” to what can be beneficially lost.
The generalization of Behe’s “Devolution” thesis to all of evolution can only be entertained through severe ignorance of cellbiology, microbiology, and ecology.
You can only come to this conclusion by carefully avoiding, as you have throughout this thread, the evidence that Behe’s claimed ‘overwhelming’ adaptive degradative mutations are unrepresentative of evolution in general.
Such willful ignorance does not make your “humble opinion” even remotely persuasive.
No, these helpful degradative mutations won’t create a new function at the molecular level but blunt a function that is not necessary to an organism in a given environment.
No, Behe argument is that the majority of adaptations are caused by degradative mutations that blunt a molecular function. It doesn’t make sense to talk about new functional degradative genes.
You are on the wrong track here for part of Behé’s thesis is that degradative mutations can be helpful, ie., good, for an organism in the short term. But the problem with these helpful degradative mutations is that they tend in the long term to make a species evolutionary brittle and more prone to extinction.
Behe is not guilty of any word game here. You really should stop accusing him of dishonesty for you may appear yourself dishonest.
I think that’s exactly right, and it illustrates something which I notice all the time: that ID Creationism is only a rhetorical strategy, not a scientific program.
I’ve had some odd disagreements with people over this over the years. When I first read Darwin’s Black Box, the rip-roaring mind-roasting foolishness seemed really obvious to me. And I would be challenged on that by people who mistakenly thought they understood the biological issues, and who would make the credentialist argument: who was I to critique a work by a brilliant biologist on biology? But of course he was far from brilliant, and most of what was wrong with DBB didn’t require one to understand the biology so much as to understand the rhetorical reshaping of the biology to make a case which it simply didn’t support.
We see that sort of thing all the time. Recently the fact came up, in another thread, that Denton is trying to make a kind of fine-tuning argument out of the fact that organisms living on the surface evolved to use those parts of the sun’s energy which reach the surface, rather than those that don’t. If he’d phrased it that way, the idiocy of the thing would be completely obvious, so instead he phrases it as an amazing “coincidence” that somehow the wavelengths that living things find useful are the same ones that get through the various layers of the atmosphere. Amazing! So good a coincidence that it could never be a coincidence, but only the act of a loving Creator! Unless, of course, you pause and actually think about it for five seconds. And that’s the quality of ID arguments in general: the five-second rule.