Michael J. Behe

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

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Even More From Jerry Coyne

In my last post I reported that University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who had critiqued my recent Quarterly Review of Biology article concerning laboratory evolution studies of the last four decades and what they show us about evolution, had asked several other prominent scientists for comments. I replied to those of experimental evolutionary biologist John Bull. In a subsequent post Coyne discussed a recent paper by the group of fellow University of Chicago biologist Manyuan Long on gene duplication in fruitflies. After a bit of delay due to the holidays, I will comment on that here. Try as one might to keep Darwinists focused on the data, some can’t help reverting to their favorite trope: questioning Darwinism simply must be based on religion. Unfortunately

More From Jerry Coyne

At his blog University of Chicago professor of evolutionary biology Jerry Coyne has commented on my reply to his analysis of my new review in the Quarterly Review of Biology. This time he has involved two other prominent scientists in the conversation. I’ll discuss the comments of one of them in this post and the other in a second post. The first one is University of Texas professor of molecular biology James J. Bull, who works on the laboratory evolution of bacterial viruses (phages). I reviewed a number of Bull’s fascinating papers in the recent QRB publication. Coyne solicited Prof. Bull’s comments and put them up on his blog. Bull says several nice things about my review, but agrees with Prof. Coyne that he wouldn’t expect “novelty” in the lab

The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution: A reply to Jerry Coyne

At his blog, Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, has been analyzing my recent paper, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” which appears in the latest issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology. Although I usually don’t respond to blog posts I will this time, both because Coyne is an eminent scientist and because he does say at least one nice thing about the paper. First, the nice thing. About half-way through his comments Professor Coyne writes: My overall conclusion: Behe has provided a useful survey of mutations that cause adaptation in short-term lab experiments on microbes (note that at least one of these–Rich Lenski’s

Methinks New PNAS Paper Is Like a Weasel

A paper by Wilf and Ewens recently published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled “There’s plenty of time for evolution,” reads like a printed version of Groundhog Day — the classic movie where comedian Bill Murray keeps awakening to find it’s the same day again. The paper’s authors sniff at unnamed benighted folks who think there hasn’t been enough time for (Darwinian) evolution to build the complexity we see in life. Not so, they protest. Why, all one has to do to see the light is to use the right mathematical model: “After guessing each of the letters, we are told which (if any) of the guessed letters are correct, and then those letters are retained. The second round of guessing is applied only for the

The Edge of Evolution, as seen by Dave Ussery and BioLogos

In his next installment Professor Ussery complains that I wasn’t enthusiastic enough in my chapter “What Darwinism Can Do.” As an example of common descent I pointed to Baker’s yeast, for which there is good evidence that sometime in the past its genome duplicated. But I also noted that other yeasts with unduplicated genomes have done fine for themselves. The point was that gene or even whole genome duplication is not the powerful tool that Darwinists often claim. That point passed over Dave’s head. His main comment on the book’s next chapter, “What Darwinism Can’t Do” is to tell the reader to search PubMed for the words “cilium” and “evolution.” One gets lots of papers that contain both those words, he assures

Dave Ussery Ruminates about The Edge of Evolution

The first part of Professor Ussery’s review of The Edge of Evolution on the website BioLogos is mainly an exercise in throat clearing, where he describes his “philosophical and personal perspective,” notes that he and I agree on common descent, and correctly points out that my book concerns the mechanism of evolution. In the second installment Dave begins to show that he somehow just doesn’t get the big points of the book. In writing of the sickle cell and other antimalarial mutations which degrade the genome, I had said that they were “hurtful.” He misunderstands this, writing, “the example gives us is not a ‘good mutation.'” But the sickle cell and other antimalarial mutations most certainly are “good” mutations in a

BioLogos Voices Sing the Same Old Tune

I normally do not respond to criticisms and reviews of my work that are simply posted on the internet. Rather, I engage reviews, comments, and articles that appear in journals or prominent newspapers and magazines. The reason is that those printed venues usually ask noted scientists or philosophers to review books, so that they are very likely to contain the most pertinent and insightful comments. After all, if a book challenging Darwinian evolution is reviewed separately by the likes of Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, Michael Ruse, and Richard Dawkins, then the odds are good that they would have discovered any major errors, if such there be. However, if upon considering their criticisms, we see huffing and puffing instead of reasoned argument, or an attack on straw men instead of the actual

A Malodorous Argument for Darwinian Evolution

University of California evolutionary biologist John Avise has penned a book, Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design, and gotten it published by a top academic publishing house, Oxford University Press. Avise, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has for decades been a leading researcher in evolutionary and ecological genetics. He has written hundreds of research articles and over a dozen books. Clearly he has an impressive scientific mind. Which makes it all the more astonishing that his new book shows all the intellectual savvy of a typical late-night college dormroom bull session. As his subtitle announces, Avise is anxious to show that, despite the claims of certain renegade biochemists, the molecular features of the human genome discovered by science in

Misusing Protistan Examples to Propagate Myths About Intelligent Design

The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology recently published several papers from a workshop sponsored by the International Society of Protistologists titled “Horizontal Gene Transfer and Phylogenetic Evolution Debunk Intelligent Design.” So here we have a respected scientific society, presumably planning a workshop months in advance, and finally laying out their considered case for why intelligent design fails. As you might imagine, I was most anxious to read about it. Unfortunately, rather than scholarly papers, the manuscripts read like press releases from the National Center for (Darwinian) Science Education. So the introductory essay1 by Avelina Espinosa tells us that ID has “creationist beginnings,” claims that I say “evolution” is

God, Design, and Contingency in Nature

I recently received an email asking if the correspondent correctly understood my views about intelligent design and God. Since I sometimes get similar questions, I’m posting this correspondence for anyone who is interested. Q: I understand your current position to be that design is detectable in nature, and that design detection is not merely a theological gloss upon the scientific facts, but is actually an activity appropriate for science. I further understand you to be saying that design detection in itself is neutral regarding the way that the design found its way into nature. Thus, if the bacterial flagellum is designed, it *could* be that God took a regular bacterium and miraculously “tweaked” it, or it *could* be that God “front-loaded” the evolutionary

Probability and Controversy: Response to Carl Zimmer and Joseph Thornton

The science writer Carl Zimmer posted an invited reply on his blog from Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon to my recent comments about Thornton’s work. This is the last of four posts addressing it. References appear at the bottom of this post. At the end of his post Thornton waxes wroth. Behe’s argument has no scientific merit. It is based on a misunderstanding of the fundamental processes of molecular evolution and a failure to appreciate the nature of probability itself. There is no scientific controversy about whether natural processes can drive the evolution of complex proteins. The work of my research group should not be misintepreted by those who would like to pretend that there is. Well, now. I’ll leave it to the reader of my previous replies to

Severe Limits to Darwinian Evolution: Response to Carl Zimmer and Joseph Thornton

The science writer Carl Zimmer posted an invited reply on his blog from Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon to my recent comments about Thornton’s work. This is the third of several posts addressing it. References will appear in the last post. Now back to Thornton’s first point, the role of neutral mutations (which he sometimes labels “permissive” mutations). At several places in his post Thornton implies I’m unaware of the possibilities opened up by genetic drift: Behe’s discussion of our 2009 paper in Nature is a gross misreading because it ignores the importance of neutral pathways in protein evolution…. Behe’s first error is to ignore the fact that adaptive combinations of mutations can and do evolve by pathways involving

Not So Many Pathways: Response to Carl Zimmer and Joseph Thornton

The science writer Carl Zimmer posted an invited reply on his blog from Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon to my recent comments about Thornton’s work. This is the second of several posts addressing it. References will appear in the last post.Now to Professor Thornton’s reply. He writes at length but makes just two substantive points: 1) that neutral mutations occur and can serendipitously help a protein evolve some function (“ ignores the key role of genetic drift in evolution”); and 2) that just because a protein may not be able to evolve a particular function one way does not mean that it, or some other kind of protein, can’t evolve the function another way (“nothing in our results implies that, if selection were to favor the ancestral

Piddling Pebbles and Empty Promises: Response to Carl Zimmer and Joseph Thornton

The science writer Carl Zimmer posted an invited reply on his blog from Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon to my recent comments about Thornton’s work. This is the first of several posts addressing it. References will appear in the last post. I must say, it never ceases to amaze me how otherwise-very-smart folks like Zimmer and Thornton fail to grasp pretty simple points when it comes to problems for Darwinian mechanisms. Let me start slowly with a petty complaint in Carl Zimmer’s intro to the post. Zimmer is annoyed that I think Thornton’s latest work is “great,” yet I thought his previous work published a few years ago was “piddling.” “Why the change of heart?” wonders Zimmer. It’s really not that hard to understand.