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A Mousetrap for Darwin, and Another for Lenski

Darwin Devolves
Photo: Richard Lenski, by Zachary Blount [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons.

Today’s ID the Future extends the discussion of A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael Behe Answers His Critics, the latest from Discovery Institute Press. Here the focus is on Parts 4 and 7 of the new book, and in particular Richard Lenski’s Long Term Evolution Experiment at Michigan State. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

What has Lenski’s long-running project demonstrated? As Behe explains in the book, and elaborates on in today’s podcast:

The study has addressed some narrow points of peculiar interest to evolutionary population geneticists, but for proponents of intelligent design the bottom line is that the great majority of even beneficial mutations have turned out to be due to the breaking, degrading, or minor tweaking of pre-existing genes or regulatory regions. There have been no mutations or series of mutations identified that appear to be on their way to constructing elegant new molecular machinery of the kind that fills every cell.

Listen as Behe fills in the details with host Eric Anderson. And to go still deeper, pick up A Mousetrap for Darwin here.