Behe's website

[PhDP]

1:00 am.

 

Tired.

 

Too much MatLab.

 

Too much genetics.

 

Need a good laugh.

 

Solution; a free visit to M. Behe's website, Mr. Irreductible complexity.

 

Very funny.

 

First of all, unlike most scientists, Behe doesn't feel the need to use visually appealing graphics. Nooooooooooooooooo. But, he got a mousetrap. I could not believe this, I mean, this guy must sit on more $$$$ than most evolutionary theorists (of course, the source is different).

 

Right after that, there's the "the Lehigh university is ashamed of my ideas but for some reason hasn't fired me yet" disclaimer. Which is also quite unusual. But hey, when you're a révolutionaire...

 

And at last, a list of 'publications'. Again, a novelty. Most of the "selected publications" are from the 'New York Times'. For some reason I don't yet fully understand yet, most scientists prefer to include articles from what we call 'science journals'. Not Behe, he's beyond that kind of logic.

 

Well, wait, no, there's ONE real publication there. An article published in Protein Science. But to be fair, it can't really be a good science journal, at least, not when it comes to evolutionary theory.

 

There's also something that I find quite funny about this article; Michael Lynch wrote the most comprehensive critique of the article.

 

You read right; Michael Lynch !

 

Most people don't know Michael Lynch, but he's one of the most influencial evolutionary biologist, not only he wrote the bible of quantitative genetics, but he's also a very creative scientist. And, the most ironic thing of all; he's as far as you can get from guys like Dawkins (the typical deamon in the ID mythology). #1; he actually does research, and he's good at it, we can easily name several contributions he made to our understanding of evolution. #2, most importantly, he's not a darwinist. He strongly believe in the importance of drift/mutations and has often critizised biologists for their naive interpretation of evolution;

 

Building a straw man based on natural selection alone makes it easy for opponents to poke holes in evolution.

 

Yet, of all people, he was the one to challenge Behe's article, and I'm sure there's plenty of IDists out there to portray him as a "darwinist". It's not even sad anymore, it's just funny.

 

The link = http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/faculty/behe.html

 

And I'll finish this post with a quote from our darwinlusionist of the day; Michael Lynch;

 

Second' date=' IDers like to portray evolution as a mere theory. But after a century of close scrutiny, evolutionary theory has passed so many litmus tests of validation that evolution is as much a fact as respiration and digestion.

 

Less widely appreciated is that evolution has long been the most quantitative field of biology, well grounded in the general principles of transmission genetics. Yet few students at university, and almost none at high school, are exposed to the mathematical underpinnings of evolutionary theory. The teaching of evolution purely as history, with little consideration given to the underlying mechanisms, reinforces the false view that evolution is one of the softer areas of science.[/quote']