Darwin Devolves: The End of Evolution?

We did hit on irreducible complexity and edge of evolution a lot. That is because Mike did not accurately present the status of those arguments, and his devolution case depends on both these two arguments being correct.

As for the new argument, he rules out anything but Darwinian processes being useful from the get go. He makes several important omissions. We point out several examples that counter his case, but there are more. The strange thing is that he seems to think Lenskis experiment is a good demonstration of his law, but Lenski’s experiment does not extrapolate to macroevolution. It’s designed to test other things.

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There is also a bit of psychological projection going on. Behe seems to be describing himself:

" It’s the equivalent of a reviewer being rendered speechless, but soldiering on because he’s been assigned to write 700 words — gotta say something ."

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Then I don’t think you understand either his argument or our rebuttals. My other essays on this book will have more space and maybe help you see our point more clearly.

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Yes, exactly. His complete and total misunderstanding of the LTEE is shocking. He expects to see things (innovation, creativity) that the experiment is precisely designed NOT to generate. It’s a nearly perfect recipe for streamlining, efficiency, and rapid growth, and those are the adaptations that emerge.

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Hi Nathan,

I look forward to your longer analyses. Science reviews don’t give the space one needs.

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There are several articles in the works @pnelson. Nathan has one coming out on his blog, and next week his longer in a magazine comes out. I am planning an article here at PS too. It is possible that Lenski might explain more too.

From my point of view, however, I think Dennis Venema explains it aptly:

If that is the tack Behe wants to go, he is more than welcome to do so. It would be another example of not engaging with legitimate critique.

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I’ve lost count and this may be mentioned elsewhere, but there is yet another response from EN this morning:

https://evolutionnews.org/2019/02/cited-to-attack-darwin-devolves-study-devolves-on-close-inspection/

To quote:

The review is a hit piece, but it’s so insubstantial that Behe must feel like he’s just been bludgeoned by a stick of cotton candy leavened with fairy dust. (The fairy dust here are the oft-recycled Darwinian fairy tales — e.g., whale evolution.)

I propose a new term to describe this strategy of panic-induced spam - “spamic”.

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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Science Review Offers False Accusations about Chloroquine Resistance

Boy, they are losing it.

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@NLENTS check this out.

https://darwindevolves.com/criticism/

Notably, they leave out our responses. Perhaps we should create our own page, to give a more complete picture?

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The ID folks clung to him… even though he never once discusses Adam and Eve as special creations!

@swamidass is more public with miraculous Adam and Eve than Behe ever was.

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Which ones? My polar bear article is there. My post about “devolution” isn’t, but that’s more recent and they haven’t responded to it. They may not and that’s fine. I think they’ll only post links to either positive reviews or negative ones that they actually respond to and I don’t see a problem with that. It’s a promotional page for the book, so it’s normal to be selective in which reviews you want to direct people to. I have pages for both of my books and I don’t include links to the negative reviews. (Each book got one negative review from a serious place - I’m not counting the DI, but I DID choose to link to those because why not? I don’t consider those serious. But that was my choice. I didn’t feel obligated to.)

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