by Abbie Smith

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Abbie Smith, the blogger behind the Endogenous Retrovirus (ERV) blog (original post), who we marked early as having a special talent for this creationism-rebutting stuff. Abbie works in an HIV lab and has a few things to say about Behe’s argument in The Edge of Evolution that evolution hasn’t/can’t produced any novel adaptations, genes, or protein-protein binding sites during the evolution of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, unless you are one of the several Discovery Institute fellows who denies this along with denying evolution.

Oh, and speaking of the Discovery Institute and Behe, Behe is apparently going to be on the Colbert Report tonight. Colbert has been setting an excellent example by making a point of it to bring scientists on his show – Kenneth Miller, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Shubin I think. Hopefully Colbert knows that Behe isn’t quite like these other guys. I recall that Dembski claimed he was sick after he appeared on The Daily Show next to some weird new-ager in 2005.

Anyway, if Colbert doesn’t hit the appropriate snark mark tonight, you’ll get it from Abbie for sure. I thought I got Behe pretty good in Of Cilia and Silliness, but this really takes the cake.

—Nick Matzke

Michael Behe, please allow me to introduce myself…

I’m ERV. This is my dog, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And this is my friend, Vpu. I presume you and Vpu haven’t met, as you recently repeated in an interview with World magazine the same sentiment you gurgled ad nauseam in ‘Edge of Evolution’:

Gert Korthof reviews Behe’s latest book “The Edge of Evolution” and shows a level of internal contradiction one has grown accustomed to from ID proponents

Common Descent is based on genetic continuity in the history of life on earth. Design, according to Michael Behe, is based on genetic discontinuities in the Tree of Life. Therefore, Design and Common Descent are not compatible. Make your choice: it is either Design or Common Descent. Contrary to Behe, both cannot be true.

Korthof shows how Behe’s book does little to explain ‘Intelligent Design’, leaving it once again scientifically vacuous.

Or …

T-urf13 redux

A few months ago I posted an essay about a remarkable example of the evolution of Irreducible Complexity from scratch, via natural, unguided mechanisms. While the reaction to this essay has been pretty muted (precious little to take note of, save for one well-hidden reference on Uncommon Descent to “No Free Lunch”, citing pages that make arguments clearly refuted in the PT essay), I had no idea that a much bigger response, or target, would emerge from the Halls of ID. This would, of course, be Mike Behe’s recently-released follow-up to “Darwin’s Black Box”, entitled “The Edge of Evolution”.

More follows beneath the fold, but here’s the short version for those of us with miniscule attention spans -the previous essay refutes (or, better said, refuted) the EoE in no uncertain terms, showing that the centerpiece of the EoE, the value Behe assigns to the “probability” of occurrence of a protein interaction or binding site, does not agree with what we can and do know about the history of a bonafide multiple simultaneous mutation.

Given that malaria is more or less the preeminent case of intelligent design in Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution, I think everyone would find it interesting to read the July 2007 cover story of National Geographic, which is on malaria and the history of attempts, failures, and hopes of eradicating it. The story focuses on Zambia, where the infection rates are sometimes over 100% (i.e., people are infected more than once a year). I have a somewhat personal interest in this since when I was seven my family went to Zambia for a year, as my dad was on sabbatical. We all took chloroquine weekly – a nasty-tasting drug to a seven-year old, mind you. And despite religiously taking the nasty-tasting drug, I got malaria in the end anyway (the chloroquine-resistant kind, naturally), came down with it on the plane ride back to the states, and then, sick as a dog, I was paraded around undiagnosed before baffled American doctors who had never seen malaria, until someone had the bright idea that maybe I had picked up the most common disease in Africa. More nasty medicine cured it, but that was an early lesson in evolution for me, let me tell you.

Jerry Coyne educates Behe about a few common misconceptions about evolution and shows why Intelligent Design, especially ‘at the edge’ is fully scientifically vacuous.

Coyne reviews Behe’s latest book ‘the Edge of evolution’ and like many before him finds the book unconvincing and ‘rather pathetic’.

What has Behe now found to resurrect his campaign for ID? It’s rather pathetic, really. Basically, he now admits that almost the entire edifice of evolutionary theory is true: evolution, natural selection, common ancestry. His one novel claim is that the genetic variation that fuels natural selection–mutation–is produced not by random changes in DNA, as evolutionists maintain, but by an Intelligent Designer. That is, he sees God as the Great Mutator.

Well, my own personal copy of Michael Behe’s new book The Edge of Evolution arrived via amazon.com today, so I suppose it is fair game. I have linked to a few early blog comments (see more from ERV), and Michael Ruse has a short newspaper comment out today. And several other reviews are coming out in the near future in Science, Discover, etc. None of them positive at all, but it’s amazing how much attention someone can get by sacrificing scientific rigour and inserting divine intervention instead.

I don’t have a full review of the book and I won’t for a bit since I am working on other things. But I want to get dibs on one peripheral but particularly shocking and egregious error that Behe makes in The Edge of Evolution. The error is simple but it points to what I have become convinced is the true core of the mishmash known as “intelligent design”: sloppiness and wishful thinking.

So I guess DaveScot and Dembski didn’t like Mark Chu-Carroll’s critique (which I linked to) of Behe’s usage of fitness landscape concepts in The Edge of Evolution.

Well, if anyone is still having trouble getting it, check out Good Virus, Bad Creationist at the blog ERV. The reason I say it’s the best Behe critique ever is the style. L.O.L.

PS: And watch out for ERV. She’s clearly going to run the planet someday, or at least the NIH.