Prof. Behe's debate with Prof. Moran

[T_aquaticus]

@Bilbo

I’ve found two more posts by Moran that he wrote over a year later:

Moran: Sandwalk: Understanding Michael Behe’s edge of evolution

Moran: Sandwalk: Revisiting Michael Behe’s challenge and revealing a closed mind

In the second reference we find this quote, which sums it up nicely:

After all that, I failed to explain to Michael Behe what the data actually showed. It showed that chloroquine resistance develops in a two- or three-step scenario where the first steps involve an effectively neutral allele that accumulates in a population by random genetic drift. This is a fairly rare event but it happens in populations that have not been exposed to choroquine. The final step is the one that confers chloroquine resistance when the parasites are exposed to chloroquine.

After all that, Michael Behe still thinks I am defending a scenario where the first steps have to be deleterious in the absence of chloroquine so that all two (or three) mutations have to confer some level of chloroquine resistance in a stepwise manner. He thinks this is the standard Darwinian explanation. This is how he closes the debate, revealing a mind so closed that issuing a challenge was pointless.

Moran describes the non-Darwinian pathway that Behe seems to ignore. This is why attacking “Darwinian evolution” is so misguided. What Behe is attacking is a theory that scientists abandoned long ago, and Behe also fails to address the theory of evolution as it exists today.