Our next loon, Michael Behe, is a prime example of what can happen when loonery disguises itself as real science. Behe is one of the most ardent and influential creationist out there; covered in more detail
here.
Behe himself claims to accept (for instance) common descent and an old (13+ Billion years) universe. However evidence shows that he is a straightforward creationist. He consistently argues that his purported evidence that evolutionary theory does not work is automatically evidence for ID. The shifting of goalposts is obvious when he tries to argue that his opponents are inconsistent in arguing that ID is unfalisifiable (e.g.
Coyne) and empirically refuted (e.g.
Doolittle). In refusing to admit that Doolittle’s experiments - which falsified his specific predictions concerning blood clotting - were a falsification of the testable claims he forwarded with respect to irreducible complexity, Behe spectacularly demonstrates that Coyne is right to deem ID unfalsifiable (insofar as its supporters continuously change the goalposts).
Behe is also a religious apologist in general, serving as an “expert witness” for several religion related court cases.
Diagnosis: Strongly under the spell of confirmation bias, dishonest and a crackpot. As perhaps the leading creationist today, Behe is very influential and dangerous.
We already saw your fake looney blogsite, so no need to repeat.
You have no evidence using mathematics or else show us something.
Why not look up Ronald Fisher in your looney website?
Ronald Fisher, a mathematician and one of the founding fathers of the Modern Theory of Evolution, proposed a Natural Law of Evolution that stated that given random chance induced changes (mutations), the fitness of an organism will always INCREASE over time due to natural selection. He derived that this evolutionary law assumes an equal number of beneficial mutations = number of harmful mutations and symmetrical distribution of beneficial vs harmful mutations.
However, extensive research has shown that the distribution of beneficial-vs-harmful mutations is NOT equal and symmetrical. Instead the distribution is very heavily biased towards HARMFUL mutations. (No surprise there as this is what creation scientists have been saying from the beginning.) Anyway, experimental measurements shows that 1) There are NO observed beneficial mutations at all, or 2) Beneficial mutations IF present are below detection limits of the experiments, or 3) Beneficial mutations IF present are less than one in a million mutations. The rest are majority HARMFUL along with some fraction that are neutral.
When we add in this experimentally determined distribution, the MATH shows that in biologically realistic situations (with asymmetric mutational distributions), the fitness of the species DECLINES over time in general. It means that mutations and natural selection do NOT work in reality.
You might as well add your name to your fake looney website haha.
As usual, you supply no source for your specious comments as your source is fundamentalist xtian websites. You really should learn the facts about biology rather than default to ICR nonsense.
Claim CB101:
Most mutations are harmful, so the overall effect of mutations is harmful.
Source:
Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 55-57.
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, pg. 100.
Response:
Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).
The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.
Beneficial mutations are commonly observed. They are common enough to be problems in the cases of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing organisms and pesticide resistance in agricultural pests (e.g., Newcomb et al. 1997; these are not merely selection of pre-existing variation.) They can be repeatedly observed in laboratory populations (Wichman et al. 1999). Other examples include the following:
Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada et al. 1995).
Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA 1977).
Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).
A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden et al. 2002).
Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat 2000).
In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright and Joyce 1997).
Whether a mutation is beneficial or not depends on environment. A mutation that helps the organism in one circumstance could harm it in another. When the environment changes, variations that once were counteradaptive suddenly become favored. Since environments are constantly changing, variation helps populations survive, even if some of those variations do not do as well as others. When beneficial mutations occur in a changed environment, they generally sweep through the population rapidly (Elena et al. 1996).
High mutation rates are advantageous in some environments. Hypermutable strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa are found more commonly in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients, where antibiotics and other stresses increase selection pressure and variability, than in patients without cystic fibrosis (Oliver et al. 2000).
Note that the existence of any beneficial mutations is a falsification of the young-earth creationism model (Morris 1985, 13).
What else can I help you with?
