Behe’s Critics Use Faulty Logic to Allege Creationist Connections to the Origin of Irreducible Complexity

Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB) published an error-filled article attacking Michael Behe and intelligent design (ID) as penance for publishing Behe’s article. So much for the claim from critics that Behe’s QRB paper had nothing to do with ID. In any case, the critical article by Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke, and Johan Braeckman uses fallacious logic to attempt to connect Michael Behe’s arguments from irreducible complexity to young earth creationism. There argument seems to be that if anyone anywhere who is a creationist has ever talked about an idea that sounds like irreducible complexity, then that was necessarily one of Behe’s sources for his ideas. Behe’s critics thus quote Henry Morris and other creationists talking about how some biological features Read More ›

Butterfly Mimicry: A “Huge” Problem for Evolutionary Biology

Can Darwinian evolution explain the complex coloration patterns found in insects that led to biomimicry? According to an article published late last year in BioScience, Darwinian evolution faces “problems” that are “huge” when trying to account for the origin of biomimicry in butterflies: The balance of Dazzled and Deceived focuses on the genetics and development of mimetic patterns, as revealed mostly through work with butterflies. The problems here are huge for evolutionary biologists. How does natural selection build a complex organism with all its integrated parts through fixation of random mutations? Butterfly mimicry has been a classic arena in which to tackle this problem precisely because the gambit is so obvious: To be a good mimic of another species requires Read More ›