The TalkDesign web site hosts a number of critiques of “intelligent design” claims, including Behe’s “irreducible complexity”.

The TalkOrigins Archive is a web site with a large number of FAQs on both antievolution claims and straightforward explications of evolutionary biology. Of special interest to Rob will be the FAQs on speciation (1, 2) and macroevolution (Macroevolution, 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution
The Scientific Case for Common Descent). There are even resources on the topic of evolving fitness and Lee Spetner.

I also have a page on evolutionary increases in information, which fills the request made by Rob nicely, IMO.

Also, check out the new weblog, The Panda’s Thumb, at which I’m a contributor.

I’d like to make an observation on “intelligent design” in general. ID claims are aimed at obtaining a concession that evolutionary processes are insufficient to account for observed biological phenomena. After that, ID advocates hope that people will simply fill in with an “intelligent designer” of their preference to cover the gap. ID arguments are all of the negative variety: because evolution can’t do this, you must accept that an “intelligent designer” did.

So, how do ID advocates wend their way toward finding evolutionary insufficiency? Do they identify phenomena with good evidential records of their origin and find that no natural mechanisms are able to cover the situation? No, they do not. ID advocates identify the systems that have the least evidence that can bear upon just how they might have arisen and whack on those. If evolutionary biologists don’t have the evidence to work with, they certainly can’t generate “detailed, testable pathways” that ID advocates like Rob claim it is their burden to produce. This is such a weak and pathetic strategy that the term I use for Michael Behe’s arguments now is “God of the crevices”. You see, Behe’s claim to fame is to have taken the old young-earth creationist bleat of “what good is half a wing?” and bring it into the modern era of molecular biology, reborn as, “what good is half a flagellum?” Biochemistry, Behe says, is the basement floor, and there is no further place to go. Thus, the gaps Behe goes on about have a bottom, and are crevices.

Back in 2001, I was in a panel with William Dembski, and pointed out that the only way for ID to progress was to take up those case where there was evidence at hand. Things like the impedance-matching system of the mammalian middle ear and the Krebs citric acid cycle. Michael Behe was sitting in the audience at the time. Have ID advocates taken up those sort of systems for analysis? Not on your life.

“Intelligent design” advocates use Behe’s “irreducible complexity” and Dembski’s “specified complexity” as arguments to convince people to disregard theories which have some evidential support, and force acceptance of conjectures with no evidential support. It’s a good trick, that.

I should have said “least complex examples of IC” instead of “weakest examples”

I simply noted that the article seemed most factual and observation-based when discussing the “least complex examples of IC” (which seemed like a cheap shot) and got more hypothetical and reliant on unproven assumptions of evolutionists as it moved on to the more advanced examples.

>hypotheses are consistent with
>what we know about how genes mutate…

Oh really? Are you familiar Dr. Lee Spetner and his book, “Not By Chance! Shattering The Modern Theory of Evolution”

Spetner graduated from MIT with a PhD in physics. Later, he studied mutations for years at the Department of Biophysics at John Hopkins University.

Basically, Spetner says that, in years of studying real-life mutations in a lab, the vast majority of non-neutral mutations delete or scramble DNA. Little to none actually add new genetic structures… and there are built in fire-walls which make it rare for a mutation (of any type) to gain momentum within a population.

Therefore, when you combine two rarities (“additive” mutations) with the “firewall” (my description) which makes mutations difficult to spread into the overall population… you get an extreme rarity.

Spetner is not saying that this is impossible… only that it is so rare that there is simply not enough time since the earth cooled for Evolution via mutations & natural selection to get the job done.

Also, when you have to wait a long time to get enough additive mutations to make changes (if there is even enough time or enough additive mutations), you end up with many more harmful mutations along the way that have to be factored in. In fact, it more sensible to say that natural selection weeds out the bad mutations more than anything else. But anytime that this happens… the supposed additive mutation would be “killed off” as well…. kind of like a storekeeper who loses a little bit on each sale… might make a tiny profit on one sale very decade or so… and then says, “don’t worry, I’ll make it up on volume.”

Finally, at the very least, the irreducible complexity examples that Behe refers to raise the bar of all the stuff evolution has to accomplish in this timeframe. Whatever you think you’ve proven regarding IC, you can’t take the “complexity” out of “irreducible complexity”

Sure there are many examples of microbes and viruses gaining more complex DNA by horizontal transfer between them… but this cannot be used to explain evolution because these transfer DNA that was ALREADY in existence.

Also, there are a handful of examples where a single mutation gives an organism a benefit by adding a function …but often, this addition also removes another function… thus making it a controversial topic as to whether DNA was truly added. (nylonase, for example)

Therefore, Carl, can you list for me examples actually observed in a laboratory or in nature which demonstrate mutations which “added” DNA without horizontal transfer, and which were sufficient to cause speciation? (If you can’t find any sufficient to cause speciation… how about giving me the most extreme examples that scientists have observed.)

BTW, try to do better than “nylonase”.

Even more puzzling is your reference to Intelligent Design’s “weakest examples.” If Intelligent Design cannot explain such examples, then what can? Evolution? So does Intelligent Design dip in here and there in the history of life, leaving evolution to handle these “weak examples”? Behe himself seems suggest that the evolution of hemoglobin from myoglobin is not a good example of Intelligent Design, offering no explanation for how it actually happened. According to evolutionary biology, it occurred hundreds of millions of years ago through gene duplication. So here we have an ancient, incredibly profound event–a classic case of macroevolution–handed over to the forces of evolution.

It’s these sorts of inconsistencies that make the vast majority of biologists look at Intelligent Design as an absolutely useless concept.

When providing the most details and evidence, it took “cheap shots” at the weakest IC examples.

As it progressed to harder examples, it invoked more and more wishful thinking, more guesswork, more circular reasoning, and less hard science.

Finally, when it got to the best examples of IC, it leaned on the weight of its earlier stated pathetic arguments and evidence (or lack thereof) and continued to invoke guesses rather than hard science.

Also, several significant IC examples were left out.

It was almost hilarious that the article expected Behe to “prove” that systems are irreducibly complex when it is actually up to the Darwinists to “prove” that the system is evolvable without evoking wishful thinking and circular reasoning.

hint: real life examples where a single mutation is the only change needed to allow a process to act in a new way is not good enough because these examples provided are no where near the complexity of Behe’s best examples of IC, for example.

Incidentally, creationists believe in a “Fall”. This is perhaps the moment Intelligent Design introduced cancer cells into the world.

Avastin is the commercial name for the Genentech drug that recently went through Phase III clinical trials and was shown to significantly increase survival rate in colorectal cancer patients.

http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/results/bevacizumab-and-colorectal-cancer0601

What’s special here is that Avastin is an ‘anti-angiogenesis’ drug. i.e. it was designed to suppress growth of new drugs.

So – the short story is that preventing new blood vessels helps kill cancer. So these new blood vessels were made by the tumor, for the tumor.

Anyway, I’ve given up arguing with creationists. I am too weak.

So keep it warm and fuzzy and save your energy.