The ENV article continues the “hit piece” trope. Too bad. This study uses an engineered system to test a specific evolutionary mechanism:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6105/384
The response over at DI is that this doesn’t count because it is an engineered system. This objection sounds very much like the 3rd law of creationism:
- The Law of Reproducible Results : Anything found in nature was Designed, unless it can be reproduced in the lab. Corollary: Anything intentionally done in a lab is not natural; it’s a purposeful result. Therefore, all lab results are evidence of Intelligent Design.
Perhaps @Wayne_Rossiter can explain why he thinks this a sensible response to this study. Moreover, to be clear, this objection does not appear in Behe’s book. From our review, however, we write:
modern evolutionary theory provides a coherent set of processes—mutation, recombination, drift, and selection—that can be observed in the laboratory and modeled mathematically and are consistent with the fossil record and comparative genomics.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2019/02/07/darwin-devolves/
Gene duplication followed by divergence is a process that we can observe directly in the laboratory (in systems engineered to test it) and is consistent with the fossil record and comparative genomics (outside the laboratory). It explains how new functional information arises.