Intelligent Design
Debate Over Behe’s Edge of Evolution in Genetics
The debate that isn’t supposed to exist in science continues in the science journal Genetics, where Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, generated a response in the form of a paper by Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt, “Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution.”
In their effort to refute Behe’s claims, Durrett and Schmidt get a few things wrong, which Behe is able to point out in a reply published in Genetics, which Durrett and Schmidt also responded to in the journal.
What we have here is a full-fledged debate over the limits of Darwinian evolution, a debate that Behe raised with his book and continues to trouble Darwinists who respond in scientific journals because it’s an interesting scientific question — and one that has yet to be answered satisfactorily.
Dr. Behe has more about the debate up at his Amazon blog, where he’s running a series of posts this week discussing the Genetics paper:
As the title implies, it concerns the time one would have to wait for Darwinian processes to produce some helpful biological feature (here, regulatory sequences in DNA) if two mutations are required instead of just one. It is a theoretical paper, which uses models, math, and computer simulations to reach conclusions, rather than empirical data from field or lab experiments, as The Edge does. The authors declare in the abstract of their manuscript that they aim “to expose flaws in some of Michael Behe’s arguments concerning mathematical limits to Darwinian evolution.” Unsurprisingly (bless their hearts), they pretty much do the exact opposite.
Read more at Behe’s Amazon blog, and remember this whenever someone tries to tell you there is no debate over evolution in science.