Nobody should, but that does not mean nobody does. Behe has no motivation to actually make sense to scientists or the scientifically informed. He only needs to convince the likes of @colewd. And we can see how well that is working.
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Why are you having long discussions with him though?
Terms like “difficult”, “improbable”, and “impossible” are being thrown about without any model to asses them with.
Behe can’t even show us his own model. At a minimum, he would need an estimate for how many coordinated mutations are possible in a given genome.
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Except that your presentation of Behe ´s thought is a straw man.
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Exactly.
On the other hand in order to argue the search is not a problem you need to show lots of people with phones. This has been your argument over the years as you have tried to show that numbers like Axe’s are over stated due to your assertions that functions are too narrowly defined. A broad definition of function adds more people with phones.
If the search space is very small you do not need lots of people with phones. The size of the search space is relevant to the problem its just not the only variable.
Where?
To get to the heart of what he believes and illustrate that it isn’t scientifically robust.
And per your latest comment, based on the conversations we just had, wherein I specifically asked him if an ongoing event could be characterized as the result of design, I am emphatically not strawmanning him.
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You’ve made a similar claim before in defense of Behe’s statement, but refused(or ignored calls) to elaborate on how it is a straw man. I don’t see how it is a straw man so I’d like to see some clarification.
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In what way, precisely?
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If you are going to claim that search IS a problem then you need to show that there aren’t lots of people with phones. That’s lacking.
Instead, we get the Sharpshooter fallacy where someone dials a 7 digit number and then is amazed when someone answers because the chances of someone having that precise phone number is 1 in 10 million.
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And we get the opposite sharp shooter fallacy when one claims there are 7 million people with phones with 7 digit numbers yet after 1000 tries no one answers the phone. The Lenski experiment is an example of an unanswered phone.
Living species are examples of the answered phones.
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Ask yourself a couple of questions. First, what do you believe an “answered phone” would look like? Next, do you think, based on anything Lenski has ever written, that such an outcome would be expected to occur?
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Just to make it clear here, the phone numbers are supposed to be sequences in protein sequence space, right? And an unanswered phone is a sequence without a function. An answered phone is a functional sequence.
How in the flying fork does an experiment then constitute an “unanswered phone”?
So they took a bacterium from it’s complex natural environment in the mammalian gut, put it into an essentially constant flask-environment and fed it only minimal medium(which it could already grown on), and then because it has continued to evolve ever higher fitness without producing a new protein coding gene in 20 years, it’s an “unanswered phone”? So the experiment is “a sequence without a function”?
The sense-making is weak in this one.
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Hi Curtis
I don’t know what the expectations of the experiment was from a de novo gene/protein stand point. I think the Lenski experiment would be interesting for Mike and @dsterncardinale to discuss.
The hope was to isolate a lineage of bacteria that had evolved aerobic citrate metabolism, which happened. This was achieved by a recombination event that put a different promoter in front of the protein responsible for citrate metabolism so that they gene was expressed in aerobic conditions.
Of course, we have already discussed de novo protein activity, such as beta-lactamase activity found in catalytic antibodies. There is T-urf13 which is a de novo protein with ligand gated pore-forming receptor.
We can keep showing these, but is it going to make a difference?
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This is not actually true. The premise of the experiment was to assess the repeatability of evolution (which is why they have 12 lineages evolving in parallel under identical conditions, spawned from the same initial colony), and to explore the limits of adaptation (will fitness continue to improve or eventually grind to a halt?). See here where Lenski elaborates on the purposes of the kinds of questions the experiment was designed to answer:
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I’m a Christian, and I think this way. But I don’t think all the rest of us will let me speak for them.
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Saying this:
means you shouldn’t have said this:
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I agree! We’re going to set up at least one more, on Darwin Devolves, and if I recall from when I read it, that work leans heavily on the LTEE.
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