[Right Wing Professor]

I don't think the plaintiffs' attorneys are going to lay a glove on Behe. If the plaintiffs' attorneys think they can outsmart Behe, they are mistaken.

Miller has done a nice job of outsmarting Behe over the years. He got Behe to admit the blood clotting cascade was not IC. Since he's advising the plaintiffs, I'm sure they will continue the process.

[Coyoteman]

===> Placemarker <===

[connectthedots]

Miller has done a nice job of outsmarting Behe over the years. He got Behe to admit the blood clotting cascade was not IC.

You have a link?

[wyattearp]

I read through Behe's “A True Acid Test” Response to Ken Miller (link at the bottom, as I can't get it to work in the body of the text - grrr), which was a response to the aforementioned "The Evolved Galactosidase System as a Model for Studying Acquisitive Evolution in the Laboratory"

I think that Miller is going to have something to say about it, now that Behe brought it up. The following is Behe's endnote from the article:

Miller’s prose is often exaggerated and sometimes borders on the bombastic. Perhaps he uses such a relentlessly emphatic style in the hope of overwhelming readers through the sheer force of his words. Perhaps he just has a much-larger-than-average share of self-confidence. Fortunately, in this section on the “acid test,” experiments exist to show that his prose is bluster. Let me be blunt—Miller always writes (or speaks) with the utmost confidence, even when experiments show him to be quite wrong. I would caution readers of his work not to be swayed by his tone, whose confidence never wavers even when the evidence does.

(trueorigin.org, a blatant attempt to mimic talkorigins.org)

[Diamond]

Miller has done a nice job of outsmarting Behe over the years. He got Behe to admit the blood clotting cascade was not IC.

To set the record straight:

The second and more important point is that, while the paper is very interesting, it doesn't address irreducible complexity. Either Miller hasn't read what I said in my book about metabolic pathways, or he is deliberately ignoring it. I clearly stated in Darwin's Black Box metabolic pathways are not irreducibly complex (Behe 1996) (pp. 141-142; 150-151), because components can be gradually added to a previous pathway. Thus metabolic pathways simply aren't in the same category as the blood clotting cascade or the bacterial flagellum. Although Miller somehow misses the distinction, other scientists do not. In a recent paper Thornhill and Ussery write that something they call serial-direct-Darwinian-evolution "cannot generate irreducibly complex structures." But they think it may be able to generate a reducible structure, "such as the TCA cycle (Behe, 1996 a, b)." (Thornhill and Ussery 2000) In other words Thornhill and Ussery acknowledge the TCA cycle is not irreducibly complex, as I wrote in my book. Miller seems unable or unwilling to grasp....
Michael Behe

Cordially,