At 46:20-47:00 minutes he mentions “arguing for Darwinian principles.” I interpret this as Behe saying someone doesn’t understand evolution. He was arguing for a paradigm shift. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltmhpG8fydM
Sanford also argues for a paradigm shift at 27:30 - 27:50 https://youtu.be/i-y_dmi_oF4
For instance, my understanding is that they are saying that this…
The tendency to see intelligent design in nature is an old one, but science moved past it long ago. As François Jacob wrote in Science over 40 years ago, “Natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer — a tinkerer who does not know exactly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him… to produce some kind of workable object.”
…is arguing for Darwinism still - They’re saying an up-and-down process where selection or any other evolutionary force creates/produces a “leap up” that’s large enough to overcome damaging mutations we observe doesn’t actually exist. It’s a myth. That’s the theme of every one of Sanford’s papers. So I was asking what these forces were. How powerful are they? Does anyone write about that?
If I understand him correctly, Behe likewise was saying this definition of exaptation is a Darwinian magic wand because it’s ignoring all of the molecular level changes required:
The evolutionary ancestors of whales lost their ability to walk on land as their front limbs evolved into flippers, for example, but flippers proved advantageous in the long run.
Behe is saying that design must occur somewhere in the process because of the complexity. Sanford is saying that all the diversity and design is front-loaded.
Take away the fossil record and pretend it doesn’t exist. You pointed to a few papers that may show new functions arising. But I understand them as saying all the other examples, such as the polar bear one, show benign and possibly damaging mutations are what actually happens. The common proves the point, rather than the rare.
I think that so far the argument from ID and creationism seems to be that Darwin only knew about phenotype and not genotype, so biologists now are still unable to understand and view evolution merely and only through genetics OR biologists misapply Darwinian principles such as natural selection to genes in ways they can’t occur, or a combination of both.
That’s what I’m understanding from the Sanford’s book so far, and I think Behe may be arguing something similar as well. More reading to do…