More Excuses for Cambrian Non-Evolution

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@swamidass

Behe demands a mutation by mutation account. Axe demands a mutation by mutation account.

@Mung

I have Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution by Behe, and Undeniable by Axe. Can you point me to some specific instances?

From Behe at the Dover Trial, under oath:

Q. And I’m correct when I asked you, you would need to see a step-by-step description of how the immune system, vertebrate immune system developed?

A. Not only would I need a step-by-step, mutation by mutation analysis, I would also want to see relevant information such as what is the population size of the organism in which these mutations are occurring, what is the selective value for the mutation, are there any detrimental effects of the mutation, and many other such questions.
Kitzmiller v. Dover: Day 12, PM: Michael Behe

More importantly, identifying the full step-by-step mutational pathway is what Behe says is critical to establish if a pathway is irreducibly complex or not.

@swamidass

Behe writes a different definition, that he carries forward to this day in the Edge of Evolution .

An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway.
http://www.discovery.org/a/442

Now this definition suffers greatly compared to IC1, because it is not longer objective and directly measureable. Instead, we need to understand something of the evolutionary pathway, which is not directly observable.

So, if we don’t know the steps, it is IC. If we do know the steps it is IC too, because Behe incorrectly thinks all the steps must be selectable.

@swamidass

Embedded in this definition is an important straw man. He writes “one or more unselected steps.” Here, into the IC2 definition is being smuggled a strict enforcement of “Darwinian” evolution. Now, anyone following biology at a basic level of competence knows that strict-Darwinian evolution was falsified a long time ago, in the 1970s. We now know that a large proportion of changes are near neutral or even slightly deleterious in the short term.

So, yes one of the most famous ID proponents there is does demand a mutation-by-mutation step-by-step pathway.