Behe's Paper in Protein Science

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Behe's response to Lenski's first post

Based on his publication record, he hasn’t done anything empirical in 24 years.

One step too far. Behe once collaborated with snokes to computationally test the EoE hypothesis with a simulation. Two papers were published in Protein Science. They were later retracted. I am not sure they should have been retracted.

Behe's response to Lenski's first post

Really??? Can you link to those? Why were they retracted?

So, that is not quite right. I was going from memory. I don’t think they were retracted, but they were controversial. This was in 2005, in the lead up to Dover. I give great credit to Protein Science for publishing this.

Behe: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1110/ps.04802904

Lynch: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1110/ps.041171805

Behe: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1110/ps.051674105

Editorial Board: Editorial and position papers

It was clear when all of the correspondence was analyzed by the editors and reviewers that no useful purpose would be served by opening this topic up to “Letters,” since there was no real dialog, just statements of position. Prof. Lynch’s approach of testing the problem raised by Drs. Behe and Snoke within the modern framework of evolutionary biology represents the desirable scientific approach (Lynch 2005, this issue; Behe and Snoke 2005, this issue). As Bruce Alberts wrote in a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times (Feb. 12, 2005): “In evolution, as in all areas of science, our knowledge is incomplete. But the entire success of the scientific enterprise has depended on an insistence that these gaps be filled by natural explanations, logically derived from confirmable evidence.”

If I find any more papers in this exchange, I will add them here.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

I should also add that I was impressed by this paper when it was first published, and thought that if ID did more work like this it would be a good thing. That does not mean I agree Behe got the conclusions right on this specific paper, but engaging with data from simulations could only be a good thing for ID, and great way for them to make progress. That turned out to be correct.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Notably, Behe was modeling a simplified version of the process directly tested in this paper: Gauger: Answering Art Hunt on Real Time Evolution.

First, this paper gives us a great way to experimentally validate Behe’s conclusions, it seems.

Second, it is a good exercise to see what parts of the mechanism tested in the paper (as discussed with @Agauger), are not effectively modeled by Behe.