West: Review Borders on Fraud?

Perhaps Swamidass and company didn’t find Behe’s responses to Miller convincing. But to fail to acknowledge that he has actually responded to Miller borders on academic fraud. I will give the authors here the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps Swamidass and company didn’t bother to look at the book they cited to claim that Behe ignores Miller’s critique. In that case, their falsehood wouldn’t be intentional. It would just be sloppy and unprofessional. Either way, their failure to acknowledge that Behe has responded to Miller doesn’t reflect well on them.

For making a charge of fraud, this is a mess of a case. West already admits that he hasn’t even read Behe’s book. We certainly did.

I can tell you that Behe does not explain Miller’s mechanism for evolving the coagulation system, or explain what is wrong with it IN THE BOOK. He spends his time explaining whether or not the coagulation system is IC1 or not (Which Irreducible Complexity?). This is a nonsequitur, because we already know that IC1 systems are evolvable. Given that the entire appendix is an attempt to give an update on the IC argument, this is a gross ommission. It distracts from what the real critique from the scientific community has been.

Our point has not been that Behe has never responded in a blog post to each and every point we raised. Rather,

  1. IN THE PAST, he has not responded adequately to these critiques in the past (AND WE LINK TO A REVIEW OF THIS TOO: Braterman: Moving Goal Posts on Irreducible Complexity - #3 by swamidass),

  2. IN THE BOOK, he does not alert readers to these critiques and the controversy, giving the impression the IC argument is unanswered, and

  3. IN THE BOOK, his devolution argument depends on the IC argument being valid. The IC argument, however, is not valid. We know this from direct experiments. This breaks his devolution argument entirely.

So this is not an off topic swipe. Behe’s starting premise is that his first two books are correct, but they are not.