Apparently Behe has been mentioning this in his England tour:
Volume 85 Number 4 December 2010 Major Articles
Current Perspectives on the Biological Study of Play: Signs of Progress Kerrie Lewis Graham and Gordon M. Burghardt
Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution” Michael J. Behe
What is an Individual Organism?: A Multilevel Selection Perspective Henri J. Folse III and Joan Roughgarden
Irreducible Incoherence and Intelligent Design: A Look into the Conceptual Toolbox of a Pseudoscience Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke, and Johan Braeckman
The Boudry article is online here and is quite good, catching points that most commentators on the IC argument miss. (Part of the goodness is that it cites Pete Dunkleberg’s 2003 “IC Demystified” at talkdesign.org, which is one of the better discussions out there.)
If past experience is any guide, Behe’s article will make abstract arguments about the improbability of adaptations *if* many simultaneous events are required, but will present no evidence that many simultaneous events are likely to be necessary for the sorts of adaptations we actually see in biology. Positive evidence for ID will not be provided at all, but the article will be trumpeted as such by the usual ID propagandists. But the article isn’t out yet, so we’ll see, I suppose.
Judging by the title, I’m going to guess that he may be arguing for some sort of difference between “beneficial” mutations and “constructive” mutations. He’s done this before, in response to Lenski’s work:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/inte[…]distinction/
and also in response to the Perfeito, “Adaptive mutations in bacteria: high rate and small effects” paper:
http://behe.uncommondescent.com/200[…]tion-part-1/
Also, on the subject of simultaneous mutations, apparently Michael Lynch kind of sort of agrees with Behe in his recent paper:
Lynch, M. et al. (2010) Scaling expectations for the time to establishment of complex adaptations. PNAS, 107, 16577-16582.
from the paper:
It’s a very interesting paper.
Lynch‘s arguments fall into a pattern I commented on in the previous thread – it is interesting that there are ways for (near-) simultaneous mutations to happen, but there aren‘t a lot of reasons to think that this is a common requirement for e.g. binding sites, acquiring new substrate metabolism ability, multiprotein machines, etc. There is lots of evidence (eg in vitro evolution) that the simpler features (eg) binding sites) are often reachable by accumulation of single mutations, and the more complex things by a circuitous route involving one or more changes of function, but without deleterious intermediates.
Yes, and English is ‘degraded’ Old Frisian, and French is ‘degraded’ Latin.
FFS.
Well, to be fair he isn’t just pulling this suggestion out of thin air - he provides references for the statement that “in all but very small populations, complex adaptations appear to be achieved by the fortuitous appearance of combinations of mutations within single individuals before fixation of any intermediate steps at the population level”. I have read some of these references in the past, but can’t really remember how they bear upon this particular issue, so I can’t say if he’s right or not. One is the Durrett and Schmidt attack on Behe.
I read an interesting paper recently that suggests that deleterious intermediates may not always necessarily be a problem:
Meer, M.V. et al. (2010) Compensatory evolution in mitochondrial tRNAs navigates valleys of low fitness. Nature, 464, 279-282.
they conclude:
Lynch’s paper is here BTW:
http://www.indiana.edu/~lynchlab/PDF/Lynch187.pdf
and another recent one worth reading:
http://www.indiana.edu/~lynchlab/PDF/Lynch182.pdf
So where has Dr. Behe been speaking? I can’t imagine a college inviting him.
Yeah, it seems like we haven’t heard much from him since he got his tush handed to him in Dover. I also would think him a persona non grata in academic circles. Maybe he’s touring churches?
There’s a list of where he’s been speaking here:
http://www.darwinordesign.org.uk/in[…]mp;Itemid=28
Fascinating that like many of his recent American lectures, he is speaking at churches or similar religious houses of worship:
Thanks for the link. It says,
I’d agree with the part about being entertaining.
Would be more so if heeded Ken Miller’s advice to write a textbook on Klingon biochemisty (I can’t take credit for this. Ken suggested it after we had dinner a few years ago in Midtown following a talk he gave at the American Museum of Natural History.):
Steve F -
The paper is very mathematical, but to paraphrase it, it presents a model by which recombination events in diploid organisms can overcome a barrier when two beneficial alleles, are required simultaneously for a favorable adaptation that will experience positive selective pressure.
It is, thus, something of an “exact opposite of Behe” argument - but the model only works in diploid populations.
The text I’ve blockquoted above is a little vague - I don’t know what the definition of a “molecular machine” is - but it seems to describe adaptations that are not at all uncommon in haploid prokaryotes.
I guess that would be an interesting line of research. The model would predict that, if some adaptations require pretty much simultaneous acquisition of sets of more than one allele, such adaptations probably could and would occur in prokaryote populations (because there are so many prokaryote genomes reproducting out there - we’re talking about unimaginably huge numbers - and their generation time is so short). However, as a rate per individual reproductive event, the step in such adaptations requiring near simultaneous acquisition of a >1 relatively new mutation allele set would be much less frequent.
Peppered BeheMoths: A Biocomical Challenge to Evolution
From the Broudy article:
This is a very good article in it’s recognition of the genetic connection to Morris and the early arguments of “scientific” creationism.
I would also add, as I have mentioned on other threads, that Morris’s concocted “evolution versus the second law of thermodynamics” argument still lies at the heart of the irreducible complexity and complex specified information arguments of the ID crowd.
This constant moving of the goalposts in response to every demonstration of evolutionary pathways to a given biological structure has at its base that fundamental misconception introduced by Morris – and pushed aggressively by him and Gish – that living systems violate the laws of physics and chemistry.
This is ultimately where the ID/creationist crowd will have to stake their claim; namely that there is some fundamental physics barrier that prevents complex systems beyond a given level of complexity from forming. Not only will they have to pinpoint that level of complexity, they will have to elucidate that “barrier.” This is the problem they cannot face, and they will seek to change the subject whenever they can.
Discovering such a barrier would be one of the most significant discoveries in the history of science, yet they are afraid of pursuing it. And we know why.
I see I misspelled Maarten Boudry’s name. My apologies.
Oh, forgot to mention: I think pan-functional fragility would just be a generalization of the situation Pete Dunkelberg describes in the third section of his talkdesign article.
Oh, great: my correction comes out before the comment it was supposed to correct. Sigh. Anyhow:
Boudry et al write that according to a strong interpretation of IC,
If I understand this claim correctly, it strikes me as poorly expressed. The fact that an impairment disrupts every current function of a complex system in no way implies that evolutionary precursors of the system did not have a function or functions. We could think of such strongly-IC systems (if there are any) as pan-functionally fragile. I’m no biologist, so am treading with caution, but my vaguely informed understanding is that a “redundant complex system” could become pan-functionally fragile over time simply by losing structural redundancies that it had in its former roles (which may have been quite different).
Which is what Boudry et al seem to suggest subsequently: “However, it is hard to see how Behe could even begin to demonstrate the existence of such a system without defaulting to the classical “argument from ignorance” (Pigliucci 2002, p. 67).”
Yet later they again argue in defense of Behe’s critics who “object that the system’s components may well be able to perform other functions in other contexts.” Again, I think that appealing to the counterfactual virtues of the system’s current components gives even the “strong” sense of IC too much credit. The point is that the system’s current components may have acquired their very specific features since the point at which the system of which they are a part acquired its current specific function(s). So conjecture about the functions that those components might have in other contexts can easily be entirely beside the point. Precursor systems may have had (and ultimately must have had) different precursor components.
This may be so wrong that it’s not worth refuting, or so obvious that it wasn’t worth saying. Still, as I read this section of the Boudry et al article, it struck me as less precise on this point than a really devastating explanation would be.
A report on Behe’s talk:
http://robertsaunders.org.uk/wordpr[…]GARGkNQorZ39
Anybody want to give me odds on whether Harun Yahya sues Behe for “sharing” pictures from his (Yahya’s) “textbook”?
He shouldn’t, since Yaha copied at least one picture from a fly-fishing catalog.
And also stole numerous pictures from the Fossil Mall website.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Dishonesty Institute or Howard Ahmanson Jr. is supporting Adnan Oktar. Makes sense IMHO because I can’t think of anyone in Turkey willing to pay lavishly for his great big book replete with such “lavish” illustrations:
Nick - Behe is not touring “England”. His tour includes Northern Ireland and Scotland and is on behalf of a Scottish outfit, the Centre for Intelligent Design.
The full sordid details of this tour can be found on our web site; access “Michael Behe in Britain” through our home page at www.bcseweb.org.uk
It’s entertaining s well as disturbing.
Roger – my bad!
Heh, just looked at the Centre for ID’s website:
Bwa ha ha!
Dismissing Intelligent Design as ‘Creationism’ is the easy way of explaining why there is no empirical evidence for design.
There, all fixed.
So, where is that empirical evidence? Asserting that something looks designed is not evidence! But it gets worse:
Later.…
What a crock of $#it. Galileo was not hindered by any scientific consensus, but by bigoted church authorities who ignored the evidence in favor of their chosen dogmas at the time. If the IDiots start off lying outright like that, why go further?
Was Behe invited to write this “major article” by QRB? What possessed them? I’m pretty sure that Behe had an entire decade in which he had published something like three original research papers. Has this article surfaced yet? Will it be peer-reviewed?
Presumably it’s a literature review on the origin of adaptations. I have yet to see Behe do a really thorough review of the literature on any topic (where thorough = I couldn’t find important stuff that he missed). It is somewhat conceivable that Behe could do a really thorough job reviewing all major cases of adaptation to antibiotics etc., and he will conclude that these are usually “degrading” mutations and not “constructive” or something. I would think that a competent review would have to mention the many cases where
(a) antiobiotic resistance is gained without “breaking” anything – e.g. transporting the antibiotic molecules out of the cell, breaking down the molecules, etc.; and the role of duplication in allowing the maintenance of the original function of the genes ancestral to the new adaptation.
(b) compensatory mutations can often pretty thoroughly and rapidly “fix” whatever was “broken” in cases where there was a fitness cost to the intitial adaptation
(c) the dubiousness of extrapolation from adaptation to a very simple environment (e.g. Lenski’s cultures), where many things might be lost, to adaptation in a complex environment, where breaking things will much less often be beneficial.
Actually, though, it’s pretty inconceivable to me that Behe has the capacity to exhibit this kind of sophistication ahead of time, so likely we’ll just see a review of something narrow, like Lenski’s work, and then grand conclusions (selection can’t do anything!) hidden behind mild phrases so as to get by the reviewers.
Okay, what is the empirical evidence FOR intelligent design?
Let’s start with some objective, testable answers to these question…
Who is the designer? What did the designer design? When? How? What is an example of something that might not have been intelligently designed?
Like you would honestly find an Intelligent Design proponent who is too guileless to make an attempt to provide positive evidence or attempt to answer questions for and about the Intelligent Designer.
You might as well spin gold out of pig’s ears.
Actually scientists are suggesting both:
a) no empirical data
b) outside the realm of science
But if you have real empirical data we’d like to see it
Disgraceful Nick. I would never say that!
Just worse!
Some Christian radio station Premier has adopted the tour - and doesn’t like the feedback
Hey Nick, Thanks, but you know the old saying “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right.” :)
Signed Pete Dunkelberg
According to Casey Luskin who started a three part series on Behe’s new opus Behe will introduce the new term FCT (Functional Coded ElemenT). Luskin describes FCT as
Though the definition includes elements not found in eubacteria the last paragraph indicates, as you already suggested, that the paper will likely deal with evolution in bacteria again.
Thanks sparc. Sounds like I got my prediction of the paper in the first comment basically right :-)
Kudos to Dr. Behe for his latest peer-reviewed publication. Between it, his tour of the U.K. and his recent scintillating article in The Guardian, he’s been on quite the role as of late.
Perhaps those here who wish to criticize this modern-day Galileo’s work will up your critiques by taking them beyond this pseudoscientific blog and stepping into the realm of the peer-reviewed world.
You mean like this?
Pallen MJ & NJ Matzke (2006). From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella. Nature Reviews Microbiology 4:784-790.
Before Dr Behe can be compared to Galileo, first, his statements must have reality-based facts supporting them. Second, his reality-supported claims must be suppressed and publicly retracted, and he, himself, be placed under house arrest while facing the threat of a potentially fatal interview with the Inquisition by the Roman Catholic Church on the grounds his claims contradict the Church’s current preferred interpretation of the Bible.
Since none of these things apply to Behe, he can not be compared to Galileo. Especially since unlike Galileo, Behe has absolutely no ability or desire to do research.
I admit I enjoyed the article in the Guardian. Behe basically says “I know a priori that stuff was intelligently designed, thus when I look at it, I see exactly what I knew was there before I looked, therefore it’s design all along.” Yep, scintillating.
As others have noted, the Designer must be as busy Designing unique snowflakes in the winter as Santa Claus is on Christmas Eve. No question every snowflake is designed, and you just gotta be impressed with the endless creativity produced in such enormous volume.
And yet, Intelligent Design proponents insist that we’re the blind ones because we don’t worship them whenever they pontify “GODDESIGNERDIDIT”
thanks you süper blog
Behe has claimed that all of the beneficial mutations observed in Richard Lenski’s E Coli experiment were “degradative”. What does he mean by that? Does he mean that the mutations were not beneficial overall? If so, is it true?
When Lenski labels mutation “beneficial”, does he take into account the “degradative” factor that Behe refers to? Do the beneficial mutations have the highest fitness?
“Scintillating”?
Judging from the article, the British use of this term apparently means “five paragraphs of fact free musings on the op-ed page”.
Encouragingly, from the comments, it seems that the Brits are well and thoroughly over the whole creationist thing.
Update