I’ve already offered you one–the polymorphism of the MYH7 cardiac/slow-muscle myosin heavy chain gene. You and Bill whiffed.
Others offer many more below. I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that you will go on ignoring them as if none of them ever existed. Am I right?
Testing hypotheses is not limited to doing experiments. Darwin was a naturalist and included a lot of field work in OoS. Behe has done nothing in the lab or in the field.
Maybe you haven’t bothered to read OoS?
How about the reconstruction of ancestral proteins, much discussed on this site?
Darwin spent 5 years gathering exciting new data from the ecosystems of the Amazon rainforest, the Galapagos Islands, etc., during his voyage on The Beagle. And he incorporated these data into his publication.
I’m sure Behe appreciates having your vote of confidence. Unfortunately for Behe, your vote won’t convince the thousands of Ph.D. biologists who participate in the peer review process. And so far, he has not made one iota of progress toward this presumably more important goal.
Best,
Chris
Time for another example of the three-step method for refuting creationists.
Step 1: Read what the creationist says.
Step 2: Check their cited source.
"I removed all the ants from about a group of about a dozen aphides on a dock-plant, and prevented their attendance during several hours. After this interval, I felt sure that the aphides would want to excrete. I watched them for some time through a lens…
Step 3: Note that their source does not match their claim.
Works every time.
Enough beating around the bush with these hypotheticals about possible biases and motivations. Yes yes, we get it, lots of people could be in denial all over the place, including on your side of the fence.
So, shall we proceed to discussing actual biology?
Like how irreducible complexity as Behe has defined it (remove a part from a multi-component system and it stops performing a function for which that part is critical) is not a barrier to evolution? That systems that demonstrably meet those criteria have been shown to evolve?
I was hoping that the example about Behe’s expectations regarding protein structure and function would get the point across. (" Specifically, Behe’s single-minded focus and blinders leads him to believe that protein function is highly constrained, impossibly so in an evolutionary context. Evolutionary biology, with a big assist from modern DNA science, that tells us that the opposite is in fact the truth of the matter. ")
The story about poly(A)-assisted RNA degradation in eukaryotes is another instance where evolutionary concepts drove the process of discovery and biochemical characterization. Enjoy.
https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/fulltext/S1360-1385(09)00176-9
I had forgotten that one. That clearly is an experiment, @Giltil, and therefore infinitely more than Behe has done.
Step 4: Wait a bit and they will falsely claim something like ‘both sides are interpreting the same evidence.’
Which definition of IC has not?
Here’s a selection:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6224/882.abstract
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095816691830209X
the problem is that in many cases, to get the function we will need a complex starting point first.
but the same is true with evolution: we cant realy refute a theory that cant be refuted. i remind you the thread about “out of place” fossils. on the other hand, we can prove that nature was designed.
any system which is too complex to be the result of natural process can fit that definition. the flagellum is such a system since its basically a spinning motor. and since we know that motors are the product of design we can conclude that the flagellum cant evolve naturally.
from here:
“When Durrett and Schmidt (2008) noted that their own estimate of obtaining two needed mutations in humans was an unrealistically long 216 million years”
see above: its not my calculation, and anyway i gave it as a theoretical claim. this is why i said “for the sake of the argument”.
and yet we have cases were the creature stay basically the same creature after about 500 my.
My “Step 4” would violate PS decorum.
Exactly. This is a perfect example of the redundancy in DNA sequences. There are numerous possible sequences that can produce the same morphology. This is yet another reason why a nested hierarchy is such powerful evidence for evolution.
Evolutionary/phylogenetic relationships between proteins is a better predictor of protein function than % residue similarity.
A recent example …
And he’s wrong. Because he makes several assumptions that are nonsense to anyone with a basic grasp of evolutionary theory. Mistaken assumptions hilariously continued after he has already been corrected on them, as though he hadn’t actually read Lynch’s response to his earlier writings on the topic.
Evolution is absolutely a falsifiable theory. To claim otherwise is just silly. Doing so in practice would be a bit tricky, considering it has passed each test so far, like when we figured out how DNA works, for example.
But that’s besides the point, because we’re not playing “I know you are, but what am I?”. This, on the other hand, gets right to the heart of the problem:
That is the thing being tested. The hypothesis is “systems that are irreducibly complex cannot evolve”. If we’re defining IC as “cannot evolve”, then the hypothesis is just “systems that cannot evolve cannot evolve”. It’s begging the question.
So I’m asking for some objective criteria that allow us to say “this system is irreducibly complex”. Behe provides some criteria that get at that, but his criteria, at least the formulations I’ve read, fail on the “cannot evolve” measure, because we’ve observed the evolution of systems that meet his criteria. But you’ve said you disagree with Behe’s criteria. So what are yours?
The specific error he makes there (or one of them) is his continuing to insist that the 1 in 10^20 number casually tossed in as an aside in a paper on malaria is a rigorous and universal measure of the number of generations required for any trait arising that requires the number mutations necessary for chloroquine resistance to arise in the malaria parasite. It is an extraordinarily silly argument.
How are the recent articles that Nathan and I just published? Behe Meets the Peaceful Science Forum - #5 by swamidass
Especially since the number came from a review, not the primary literature, and the review’s author made it clear that Behe was misrepresenting the number.
Citing text from the secondary literature instead of data from the primary literature is laughably shallow scholarship, particularly when multiple papers in the primary literature show that the single mutants Behe claims shouldn’t exist actually do.
One very large problem in these discussions is that everyone is equivocating on terminology. I am not saying that anyone specifically is doing so on purpose, but it is almost impossible not to do it since the words are so plastic and have been used rather carelessly for so long. So if you are taking issue with my use of the word ‘Darwinian’ excuse me. The point is that at that point he believed everything that Kenneth Miller believes, or everything that Richard Dawkins believes (apart from the non-belief in God), or everything that Joshua Swamidass believes in. So fine, it wasn’t what you fit in the limited definition of the Darwinian mechanism. It was everything that every mainstream scientist at the time was thinking. My point that it seems so painful to make is that he came to his current beliefs not from reading the bible, or because of a theology course or a dream, or a vision or any other of the regular ways he seems to be disparaged. He was challenged to look closely at the science supporting all of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, as well as neutral theory.
And maybe what is alluded to in the answer to the question posed here, https://youtu.be/wXU2Z3GVNFM?t=5247 will allow you to be a bit more broad in what you hear me say in the phrase Darwinian mechanism.
You claim that “Darwinian evolution can explain many aspects of evolutionary change in the past and present”, but that is called begging the question if the claims of what ‘Darwinian evolution’ can in fact explain. And to follow your own instruction to me, why are you claiming that, ‘Darwinian evolution’ can explain a lot? Haven’t we ‘advanced past plain old Darwinism.’
Why are you suggesting that, evolutionary biologist breath the rarified air of only objectivity and truth telling. I’ve got sad news for you. They are people. With the same biases, prejudices, desires for confirmation bias, willingness to be ‘gate-keepers’ at the temple of ‘orthodoxy’. If scientist working at the premier science organization in the world, NASA, can obfuscate and deny good and even simple science when the situation suits them, what in the world would make you think you’ve ‘fenced off’ the good scientists that are above such?
Anyway, thanks for the time you took to respond. I think I’m through on this thread.
Regards,
Sam