The science is so far beyond me, but I’d like to know how Behe has responded to this. It is likely that he has.
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Shouldn’t you be more interested in what the data says?
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This is a strange calculation, assuming that E. coli mutates less than 1 in 10^9 bases per generation and has a 5.10^6 bp long genome.
Given these parameters, there is more than 99% chance that E.Coli replicates its genome without error. This means that if you inoculate a flask with a unique bacterium and let it grow, you will end up with a population of bacteria in which the majority of the individual bug will have the same genotype as the initial bacterium (I assume here an hypothetical scenario were NS is not operating).
He has, but since the science is also far beyond him, there’s not point in searching it out.
It seems to me that what ID Creationists were hoping to see was was the investigators showing up in the lab one morning and finding the bacteria had grown something like a flagellum overnight, from completely new genes and proteins that had popped into existence over the course of a single generation. They don’t say this explicitly, but that is the only reasonable conclusion I can reach from their objections. What kind of evolutionary mechanisms they think would allow this to happen, I have no idea.
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If it takes a thousand generations for 1 mutation, then with a generation time of 1 day and 6000 years to work with, you are again rounding to zero.
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we do actually:
its not actually, since we are talking here about simple changes on existing proteins (in this case it not even a new protein but a new combination of existing genetic parts), and not about complex new system.
a tipical flagellum contain about 30-40 different proteins. if such system can evolve stepwise its theoretically possible to see such evolution in the lab.
Thank you for your response to me. Did you not notice however that I clearly stated that the science is far beyond me?
In an ideal world, where everyone offering an opinion was unbiased, I’d be able to ask any of the ‘experts’ here to help me interpret the data that you suggest I should be interested in.
Are you willing to do that for me?
Here, for example, is a statement from the opinion of the court in the Kttzmiller vs. Dover School Area District,
Court: “The argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s.”
May I ask you Michael how you would help me in interpreting or applying that statement or would you say that it is straightforward and needs no interpretation?
This is incorrect. If at each division the probability to produce a bug with 1 mutation is very low, it means that the number of bugs without mutation will always be higher than the ones with mutations. And this is true whatever the number of generations.
What I am wondering is - how would this actually be detected? Would one have to look at bajilllions of individual bacterial cells under the microscope to find the one(s) with flagella? Would one have to screen untold bajillions of cells using something like the motility agar assay? Do some sort of high throughput sequencing assay?
I don’t think this is a trivial undertaking.
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Going by substitutions alone, yes. But there are more types of mutations than just substitutions. For example the rate of duplication is extremely high compared to base substitutions. With rates in bacteria such as E coli in the range of 10-3 to 10-5 duplications/gene/generation, a typical E coli bacterium with ~4400 genes will suffer approximately 0.44 duplications pr replication.
See:
Katju V, Bergthorsson U. Copy-number changes in evolution: rates, fitness effects and adaptive significance. Front Genet . 2013;4:273. Published 2013 Dec 10. doi:10.3389/fgene.2013.00273
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You forget that drift happens. 1/N of all mutations will eventually become fixed, and in fact a number per generation equal to the mutation rate.
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It is actually. The evolution of the Cit+ trait is an irreducibly complex function that evolved by exaptation of pre-existing genetic components. The citrate transporter was duplicated into a different area of the genome, where it came under control of a new promoter. The previous citrate transporter still exists and is under regulation of the old promoter, and the duplicate is under control of a new promoter. If you remove the promoter, the function fails. If you remove the transporter, the function fails. It is thus an irreducibly complex function because if you remove a part of the system it stops working. That is by any definition of IC a textbook example. So it is irreducibly complex by Behe’s definition, and it evolved by random mutation, while also constituting an example of exaptation.
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Sorry, that isn’t the way statistics work. Each cell is the product of every division that came before it. Having a single mutation-free cell requires an uninterrupted sequence of perfect replications. The probability of such a series of replications occurring is U^G, where U is the probability of a perfect replication (0.999 here) and G is the number of generations (2.2E6 here). 0.999^2.2E6 is a very small number. You can then determine the probability of a single cell in a population of (N) using the binomial (which conveniently for 1 success is) P*(N-1)*(1-P)^N-1.
Which would take a very large value of N to not round to zero.
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So how would you tell who is making claims backed by the strongest evidence?
Well we don’t live in an unbiased world, so what are you going to do?
The interpretation is pretty clear: ID is bunk. It is pseudoscience.
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I’m not quite sure myself. But I will guess, and somebody correct me if I’m wrong. I guess that this is referring to a false dichotomy, the idea that any doubt cast on our current understanding of evoution is evidence for ID, because there can be no third alternative. God of the gaps. Is that it?
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What would you expect me to do? What would you want any of your loved ones to do?
It is fairly easy for me to determine what the consensus is. But have you never found yourself on the opposite side of a consensus? If not, are you suspicious of even that?
Here is an atheist’s statement regarding his views on consensus, https://youtu.be/rY5Ste5xRAA?t=5169
So, to answer your question, “so what are you going to do?”, I am going to take the limitations of my understanding, acknowledge them and do the very best I can with the arguments presented to me.
You offer no help in sifting through any ‘propagandistic’ value there may have been in the court’s opinion given above.
To be clear, your response to,
Is,
If ID is bunk or pseudoscience, Behe’s response to the court’s opinion is something that would, (at least in my opinion) be welcomed in any elementary teaching in logic.
Behe responded to the court given opinion with,
“The dualism is “contrived" and “illogical" only if one confuses ID with creationism, as the Court does. There are indeed more possible explanations for life than Darwinian evolution and young earth creationism, so evidence against one doesn’t count as evidence for the other. However, if one simply contrasts intelligent causes with unintelligent causes, as ID does, then those two categories do constitute a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of possible explanations. Thus evidence against the ability of unintelligent causes to explain a phenomenon does strengthen the case for an intelligent cause."
So to your questions,
and,
I will try and find someone tending to give less ‘groupthink’ than you seem willing to offer.
For one @Michael_Okoko it’s worth acknowledging to @sam that you may not be the expert on this…
Not if Sam is already familiar with the data. Asking about Behe’s response might be a quest for entertainment. 
I think you’re missing the fact that ID is almost entirely rhetorical in nature, eliding most of the relevant evidence.
There is no confusion. ID is religious creationism dressed up to sneak it into public schools. The Wedge Document states that very clearly.
For life itself? Behe is engaging in the creationist trope of conflating abiogenesis with evolution.
Illogical gibberish. Why doesn’t Behe formulate and empirically test an ID hypothesis?
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Well, to be fair, the Dover ID was creationism, as the school board members clumsily confessed. And evidence was presented that ID is creationism in a cheap suit, notably the Of Pandas and People draft in which “creationists” was clumsily replaced by “cdesign proponentsists”.
Nor does ID simply contrast intelligent causes with unintelligent causes. It contrasts known unintelligent causes (and a strawman of those) with undefined and unknown intelligent causes. That’s another false dichotomy, failing to consider unknown unintelligent causes. It may be a bit more sophisticated, but it’s the same false dichotomy.
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I am certainly not an expert @sam. I am a layman like you.