Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Well, yeah, that's what I said, but what I meant was....

Michael Behe--author, hack, and Intelligent Design advocate (but I repeat myself)--once said that in order to prove to him that an "irreducibly complex" system evolved naturally, he would need to be shown not only a complete step-by-step list of mutations,
...but also a detailed account of the selective pressures that would be operating, the difficulties such changes would cause for the organism, the expected time scale over which the changes would be expected to occur, the likely population sizes available in the relevant ancestral species at each step, other potential ways to solve the problem which might interfere, and much more.

Which, of course, is more detail than any other scientific principle, and a hell of a lot more than they require for I.D. About the only person who would require more evidence is Kent Hovind, who offers a phony $250,000 challenge to prove to him that evolution is true. How does one do this? By recreating the Big Bang in a laboratory. And it's a good thing that Behe requires all this information to accept that "irreducibly complex" systems can evolve, or else he'd realize that he himself has already proven that they can do so.

But let's ignore their double standards for now. O happy days, there's a new paper out that actually gives all this information! So, naturally, Behe has dropped all his objections, shut down the Uncomment Descent website, and apologized to all biologists for wasting their time up until now, right?

Of course not. He was given all that evidence and declared that it's proof of intelligent design instead. Ah, well.

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