Can you see the difference between a small adaptation that confers resistance to malaria and say, an echolocation system? If not, there is nothing I can do.
I see no difference in the mechanisms which created those features, just the length of time the mechanisms had to operate.
What do you expect to see, a bird evolving a jet engine for supersonic flight?
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So where is your evidence evolution has stopped? What does that even mean to say? How often must evolution produce whatever it is you think constitutes an âinnovationâ? Once every 20 years? 5000? 10 million? If pigs arenât growing wings out of their backs and fish arenât turning into elephants before your eyes, itâs all just stopped?
Also, this is the âcurrent stanceâ in evolutionary biology, that life has generally achieved maximum optimization, it is as close to perfect as possible, and nothing novel or innovative or adaptive can occur?
Come on man canât you see youâre trying to defend something obviously false, and frankly absurd?
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Ah, is that it? So you have come up with some evidence that Axe correctly stated that the scientific consensus is that evolution has perfected everything and stopped? If so, I do seem to have missed where you provided that.
Apparently you are unable to quote it, however. Nor would it be helpful to you if you did, of course, because Axeâs claim was not that Grasse had said these things but that they are the current consensus. Every biologist who has commented upon this in this thread has pointed out that these views are no part of modern evolutionary biology.
If this is what a robust defense of Axe looks like, the trees have little to fear.
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Iâm not sure at all that what Axe said has been show unequivocally to be false. To see this, look at the end of chapter 6 of his book where he developed more thoroughly the idea conveyed by the quote.
Nobody should care about trying to show what Axe says is false. Axe makes the claim, itâs his job to support it. He could be doing that by providing something like a poll of evolutionary biologists to support his claim that the current stance is that evolution has stopped because life has evolved to perfection.
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I have directly observed people driving automobiles from one end of a mall parking lot to the other. Yet Iâve never directly observed even one person driving a car from New York City to San Francisco.
Unless someone can show me a video of a person driving a car through every point on the alleged route between the two citiesâa supposed distance of around 2900 milesâI will continue to believe in micro-transportation but not macro-transportation.
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But all he does there is make the same unsupported claim, in the enzyme context:
âWe were wrong, critics say, to expect enzyme A to be capable of further evolution because enzymes, like animals, have been perfected to the point where theyâre no longer pliable in the hands of natural selection.â
Iâm afraid that Axe saying something false is not corroboration of Axe saying something false elsewhere in the same book.
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So does Axe actually quote anyone saying that, or does he just, well you know, make it up and assign it to the nebulous âcriticsâ?
Wow. How completely embarrassing for Axe. I knew he had climbed into the gutter with the rest of the DIâs honesty-challenged authors but I didnât realize he was doing chin-ups on the curb. 
What claim? I canât see that you have linked to that claim anywhere. Incidentally, I have never heard of GrassĂ© except in connection with creationist literature. If his work is still an essential reference for biologists, then he must never have published any volumes on birds.
He does not, of course, because nobody does say that.
He does point to a paper by Olga Khersonsky and Dan Tawfik titled âEnzyme Promiscuity: A Mechanistic and Evolutionary Perspective,â in the Annual Review of Biochemistry, alleging that Tawfik is âa champion of this idea,â but the only quote from Tawfik, evidently from that paper, is âbroad-specificity enzymes served as progenitors for todayâs specialist enzymes.â
I donât have full text access to the paper (does anybody want to send me a .pdf?), but from the abstract it seems as though the authors are saying, not surprisingly, that some enzymes are more specific than others and that enzymes which are more âpromiscuousâ are likelier to evolve new functions. It appears that Axe is trying to derive from that the idea that âpromiscuousâ enzymes no longer exist, and that all enzymes have now evolved such specificity as to grind evolution to a halt.
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By the way, Behe endorses the book. I wonder if he actually read it. His comment on the dustjacket:
âFrom childhood, everyone directly grasps that life is designed â until theyâre talked out of it by a culture saturated with materialism. Using the latest science, molecular biologist Douglas Axe shows why you donât have to be an expert to trust your firm knowledge of the wonderful design of life.â
I happen to be quite familiar with Tawfikâs work, as it has been misrepresented a lot by creationists, and he is not at all a champion of the idea that promiscuous enzymes no longer exist, or canât evolve. So Axe is lying. Or is he just incompetent? As in he would fail a literacy test?
Also, I have that paper. Iâll just quote the last summary points:
SUMMARY POINTS
- Promiscuity regards reactions that an enzyme performs, although it never evolved to do
so (as opposed to its original, native activity).- Promiscuous activities are not rare exceptions but are rather widely spread, inherent
features of enzymes, and proteins in general.- Specificity and promiscuity can reside within the same active site. Promiscuous enzymatic
functions may utilize different active-site conformers, and their mechanisms can overlap,
partly overlap, or differ altogether from the mechanism by which an enzyme performs
its native function.- Promiscuous enzyme functions provide immediately accessible starting points for the
evolution of new functions via a gradual mutational path that eventually converts a weak,
promiscuous function into the primary, native function.- A promiscuous function of an enzyme can be a vestige of the function of its ancestor.
Promiscuous activities shared by members of same enzyme family and/or superfamily
correlate with their divergence from a common ancestor.- Mutations that increase a promiscuous activity and have little effect on the primary,
native function (weak trade-off ) underlie the divergence of a new enzymatic function via
a generalist intermediate.- The notion of promiscuity as the seed of new gene functions has significant implications
for evolutionary theory. Although gene duplication is the key to divergence of new gene
functions, when and how duplication occurs and how a new enzyme diverges from an
existing one are still a matter of debate.
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The difficulty, as you highlight, with finding mere incompetence is that the incompetence would have to be quite profound to justify the misstatements. Coupled with the fact that the book is aimed at a general audience of people receptive to ID â ideologically-motivated science-illiterates â it is very hard to see how incompetence ALONE could be the issue when dishonesty is so obviously useful before such an audience. As I have said, of course, one rarely sees one or the other of these in pure form â each is usually somewhat adulterated with the other.
So you want to see something like echolocation appear de novo in the last fifty years?
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Not that itâs especially pertinent, but I believe I found the passage in Grasse which Giltil is neglecting to actually quote. He seems to have believed that evolution had slowed down, but not stopped. Even this, which doesnât match Axeâs bizarre claim, was not accepted by his contemporaries or by biologists now, so it certainly lends no support to Axe.
Okay, I can now see that there is nothing I can do. But maybe Michael Lynch can? Here is what he said in a recent article in the Journal of Molecular Biology:
One of the most significant problems in the broader body of biological thinking is the common assumption that all observed aspects of biodiversity are products of natural selection. âŠ
With this mind set, evolutionary biology becomes little more than a (sometimes endless) exercise in dreaming up the supposed agents of selection molding oneâs favorite aspect of phenotypic diversity . âŠ
However, we now know that this unwavering belief in the limitless power of natural selection is untenable. [Emphasis added.]
If true, your claim means either that the biologists who have commented on this thread are wrong to point out that modern evolutionary biology contests the idea of amortization of evolution or that modern evolutionary biology is on the wrong track.
But given that the amortization of evolution is an indisputable, observable fact, Iâm leaning towards the first alternative.
Not sure