Behe's response to Lenski's first post

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@Edgar_Tamarian

You are NOT reading my post

Well, you are not reading mine. Where did Behe address this?

@swamidass

#4. Inside The Book, The Polar Boars

It is often said, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” This level of misrepresentation is common inside the book too, not just on its cover. It is a good thing that we didn’t review the cover in Science (which we did not have), and focused instead on the inside of the book. As one example, still unaddressed by Behe, let us remember the Polar Bears, and what Behe wrote about ApoB:

Darwin Devolves: They determined that the mutations were very likely to be damaging

Behe is paraphrasing the beginning of the paragraph (https://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(14)00488-7), in which the authors write:

Due to a lack of appropriate functional studies of polar bears, we were unable to directly identify causal variants. Nevertheless, we assessed the impact of polar bear—specific substitutions on human proteins for top-20 genes under positive selection by computational predictions: a large proportion (ca. 50%) of mutations were predicted to be functionally damaging (Figures 4C and 4D, Table S7).

The authors did not determine the mutations to be damaging. They ran a program that gave some results that included the term “damaging”, and they (for a good reason) came to a different conclusion. On ApoB, one of the "damaged proteins, they write it is likely to be working more effectively. This make sense, because Polar Bears may need an effective ApoB, because they eat so much fat.

We suggest that the shift to a diet consisting predominantly of fatty acids in polar bears induced adaptive changes in APOB, which enabled the species to cope with high fatty acid intake by contributing to the effective clearance of cholesterol from the blood.

However, the end of that same paragraph shows something else. The authors did not determine the mutations to be damaging. They ran a program that gave some results that included the word “damaging” in its output, and then they (for a good reason) came to a different conclusion. On ApoB, one of the "damaged proteins, they write it is likely to be working more effectively. This make sense, because Polar Bears need a really effective ApoB because they eat so much fat.

We suggest that the shift to a diet consisting predominantly of fatty acids in polar bears induced adaptive changes in APOB, which enabled the species to cope with high fatty acid intake by contributing to the effective clearance of cholesterol from the blood.

In making a key point in support of his thesis, Behe said the authors claimed something that they did not. The same paragraph he quotes from show this is not true.

Where did Behe address this? I have not found out where he justified this representation of the author’s conclusions.

@swamidass

In his first response to @Nlents and @art pointing this out, Behe called them “incompetent”(Lents and Hunt: Behe And The Polar Bear’s Fat ). In his second response, to his credit, Behe provides new evidence that calls into question whether this was a gain or loss of function (we do not know for sure without more experiments). Behe, however, does not retract this misrepresentation in his book (Behe on Lessons From the Polar Bear Studies). Nor does he defend his initial claim was correct. He just ignores the mistake that was made.

Where has he addressed this? I have not yet seen it?

@swamidass

In contrast, DI and Behe complained vigorously that he had been misrepresented. We responded by explaining how DI and Behe misread our review, and that we have not misrepresented his book in several places. We have explained this elsewhere (e.g. Perplexing: Michael Behe’s Critics Falsely Claim He Ignores Exaptation and https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/mungs-quixotic-correction/4876 ). There are remaining disagreements between us, but disagreements are not misrepresentations. In contrast, here, Behe just ignored the misrepresentation that was pointed out to him. This is not the right way to handle such concerns.

We responded in detail to every point Behe has raised. Often we had answered him before he even made the objection. We are just asking for the same courtesy.

@Edgar_Tamarian, it seems that the squid ink from ENV is successfully confused and disoriented you. This does not take scientific expertise to understand.

1. Behe did not correctly represent the views of the author’s of the study.
2. When this was pointed out, he called us incompetent.
3. He never dealt with this fundamental critique.

Instead, he ignored our point, and jumped when to arguing he was correct.

4. To his credit, he did add new information (not into his book) that raises questions about a simplistic answer, but creates another scientific problem for him

I do not expect you to grasp #4, but #1-#3 are straightforward. He has not responded.