Evolution Message Board - Msg: 28953205

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Politics : Evolution

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To: Solon who wrote (37467)	6/14/2013 11:43:16 PM
From: 2MAR$	1 Recommendation Recommended By Solon Read Replies (1) of 69300

You are familiar with Dr Larry Moran the "skeptical biochemist" up in Toronto? sandwalk.blogspot.com Keeps quite a blog going with lots of great comments , he had the chance to meet Behe up there last yr , this was how he ended sizing him up as a fellow scientist in conclusion : I was very disappointed with the way Behe misrepresented evolutionary theory by talking only about Darwinism and natural selection. He did mention, in response to a question, that there were other "theories." The three he named were facilitated variation (Kirschner and Gerhart), Stuart Kauffman's ideas about self organization,1 and Lynn Margulis' views on symbiosis as a pervasive mechanism of evolution. I asked him why he didn't talk about modern evolutionary theory that includes random genetic drift and the fixation of nearly neutral mutations. I mentioned that this isn't Darwinism by any stretch of the imagination—especially Behe's imagined definition of Darwinism—and that by incorporating modern evolutionary theory many of his arguments become moot. Behe replied that random genetic drift was not a mechanism of evolution because all it does shuffle existing mutations. Furthermore only "Darwinism" can account for the adaptive evolution that leads to improved life forms. (This is mostly true but Behe's main criticism is that evolution can't supply enough variation to do the job required of it and Neutral Theory accounts for all the observed variation that Behe ignores in his talks.) One of the Copernicus Group physicians picked up on this and asked if there were any scientists who had another explanation for the evolution of complexity. Behe said "no." I pointed out that Michael Lynch and others have advanced perfectly reasonable non-adpative explanations of complexity. Behe asked me to repeat the name (Michael Lynch) then nodded knowingly. I asked if he had read Lynch's book (The Origin of Genome Architecture) and he said "yes." I don't understand why he doesn't discuss this in his lectures since it answers many of his "problems" with Darwinism.2 At that point my respect for Behe dropped considerably. Up until then I had been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and I had avoided calling him an IDiot. My respect soon dropped another notch when he said that he didn't accept endosymbiosis as the evolutionary explanation for the origin of mitochondria. Behe believes that evolution cannot explain how a primitive bacterium and a primitive eukaryotic cell could have co-adapted to form a cell with mitochondria. I think he means that mitochondria might have come from bacteria but that God had to tinker with the system quite a bit in order to come up with the required mutations for symbiosis. The last straw for me was when Behe invoked the "Bozo the Clown" argument3 to justify the fact that modern evolutionary biologists reject Intelligent Design Creationism. This is one of the distinguishing characteristics of kooks. If you have to defend your views by pointing out that many great scientific ideas were initially rejected by the scientific community then you've already lost the battle. No legitimate scientist does this.

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