How many diseases are really congenial? Most of them are downright unfriendly.
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Bright disease, Christmas disease, to name a couple.
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Rockin’ pneumonia? Boogie woogie flu?
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A few years ago I was telling a class about frequencies of mutants in human populations. I said that the most frequent human mutant is probably lactose intolerance. Afterwards someone suggested that I was wrong. Since a majority of humans have this allele, that is the wild-type allele. The most frequent human disorder is then lactose tolerance. A symptom of the syndrome is the ability to eat ice cream.
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That is correct.
That is not correct, or at least not correct in general. The ‘irrespective of usefulness’ definition is central to evolutionary theory. Where a mutation occurs in a piece of sequence may or may not be of interest for some particular study, but it is not of general interest. We certainly do not always model the location of a mutation.
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Could you be specific on this, and maybe link to a few of those writings? I do find it hard to reconcile various things he’s said.
Bechly’s author page at ENV has several essays over the years. The general theme is “we don’t have a final and conclusive picture of human origins, therefore Darwinism NO, therefore …”. See this and this for examples.
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Yes, I find this bit particularly odd: “So, that makes eight important discoveries this year that all were announced as challenging established theories of human origins, thus requiring a major rewrite of the story. One is tempted to ask the question, how many more major rewritings do we have to endure until a major rethinking is considered? The current consensus is refuted by more and more evidence. But in spite of all this conflicting evidence, the holy cow of Darwinian evolution of humans from ape-like ancestors may not be questioned. Why? Because that would challenge the ruling scientific paradigm of naturalism. God forbid!”
It seems to say that humans did not evolve from ape-like ancestors. And elsewhere he says that all fossils can be identified as entirely ape or entirely human. So what does Bechly actually think about human ancestry? I can’t fit this into his professed saltationism. It seems more like actual creationism. Puzzling.
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It’s simple: ID’ers are creationists, pretty much to a man. They just try to throw up a bunch of sciencey sounding smokescreens to try obscure this fact. What is Behe’s model of human origins? He accepts common ancestry, and admits that none of the problems he claims exists for evolution as a whole apply for the specific instance of the descent of humans and chimps from a common ancestor. This should be a massive controversy and crisis for ID if its proponents actually took their own “theory” seriously. But not even Behe seems much concerned about this. He makes evolution denial appear intellectually respectable to some, and that is all that counts. His work is done.
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Perhaps he got this picture from the science news feeds. Mine is continually announcing new observations and dramatically concluding that they challenge established theories. Of physics, of astronomy, of evolution.
Or one might conclude that there is some process that filters online news feeds so as to make it much less likely that they will say “interesting new observation is very consistent with boring old ordinary theory”. 
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Perhaps, but Bechly is a real paleontologist who ought to be reading the primary literature. He may be taking advantage of science “journalism”, but he should know better.
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Duh. ID is creationism in disguise, therefore IDers are creationists in disguise.
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