Month: December 2010
Michael Behe’s Quarterly Review of Biology Paper Critiques Richard Lenski’s E. Coli Evolution Experiments
In a previous post, I discussed Michael Behe’s recent paper in Quarterly Review of Biology, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” which reviews much recent work in the field of bacterial evolution. He devotes particular space, however, to the research of Richard Lenski, who has now grown over 50,000 generations of E coli in the lab to study its evolution. Lenski’s work was cited by Richard Dawkins most recent book (The Greatest Show on Earth) as the ultimate refutation of irreducible complexity. Dawkins’ book, however, made a straw man argument by discussing a misguided attack on Lenski’s work by Conservapedia editor Andrew Schalfly, completely ignoring critiques of Lenski’s research by Behe in The Edge of Read More ›
My Question for P.Z. Myers: What Endows a Human Being With the Right to Life?
P.Z. Myers has responded to my post about his views on abortion and personhood. In reply, Myers posted pictures of a zygote, an embryo, and a group of young women. He asserted that differences in appearance between these human beings was an ethical basis for denial of the right to life to humans in utero. I take it for granted that Myers, being a competent biologist, agrees with me on this point: a living human embryo/fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens (it is no other species). That is, a distinct human life begins at conception and ends at natural death. That is not to to say that Myers and I agree on rights, personhood, etc., but merely Read More ›
Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: Casey Luskin on the Impact of Jonathan Wells’ Classic Book
Peer-Reviewed Scientific Paper by Michael Behe Challenges “Gain of Function” Mutations in Molecular Evolution
Michael Behe has published a peer-reviewed scientific paper in the journal Quarterly Review of Biology titled “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” arguing that “the most common adaptive changes seen … are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function.” The observation that a particular type of molecular change involves loss-of-function has been used by leading evolutionary biologists as argument against that particular mechanism as being an important force for adaptive evolutionary change. In a 2007 article in the journal Evolution, Hopi E. Hoekstra and Jerry Coyne co-authored a review article critiquing cis-regulatory mutations as a mechanism of evolution, stating, “Supporting the evo devo claim that cis-regulatory changes are responsible for morphological Read More ›
About That Arsenic-Gobbling Microbe…Bad News for Darwinists?
NASA’s discovery of an arsenic-ingesting microbe in California’s forbidding Mono Lake looks, on the surface, like bad news for Darwinists hopeful to show what a no-big-deal it is for a planet to bring forth life unguided. The bacterium evidently uses arsenic for purposes that all other known organisms would use phosphorus, including incorporating it in DNA. A reporter for Nature News cites UC Santa Barbara geomicrobiologist David Valentine as observing that the discovery may mean “you can potentially cross phosphorus off the list of elements required for life.” That’s interesting. Under Darwinian assumptions, the observation that such an alternative life chemistry is possible means that some planets previously assumed to be inhospitable to life, due to being poor in phosphorus, Read More ›