Kenneth Miller makes Michael Behe his new little pony

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Nature vol. 447, pages 1055-1056 (28 June 2007) Behe's "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism" debunked. In a few paragraphs, Miller basically demolishes Behe's arguments. Behe's basic argument is that microevolution readily occurs (using chloroquine resistance in Plasmodia as an example) but then argues that this is the limit of evolution. Behe extrapolates the reported observation that 1 parasite out of 10^20 spontaneously acquire chloroquine resistance to human evolution and states in his book: Behe Wrote: "On average, for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would need to wait a hundred million times ten million years. Since that is many times the age of the universe, it's reasonable to conclude the following: No mutation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years." Miller wrote in response: "Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation 'of the same complexity' occurring in the human line. He hasn't. What he has actually done is to determine the odds of these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously at precisely the same position in exactly the same gene in a single individual. He then leads his unsuspecting readers to believe that this spurious calculation is a hard and fast statistical barrier to the accumulation of enough variation to drive darwinian evolution. It would be difficult to imagine a more breathtaking abuse of statistical genetics. Behe obtains his probabilities by considering each mutation as an independent event, ruling out any role for cumulative selection, and requiring evolution to achieve an exact, predetermined result." Miller goes on to compare the similar faulty logic in "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism" to that in "Darwin's Black Box".

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Uploaded: June 27th, 2007 @ 11:24 pm
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Tags: behe complexity debunked design evolution intelligent irreducible kenneth magazine michael miller nature science

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