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Monday, March 16, 2009

But remember, there ISN'T a debate over Darwinism ...

There are some great new posts at Michael Behe's Amazon blog for Edge of Evolution, and quite recently the fourth in the series Waiting for Two Mutations, went up:
An interesting paper appeared several months ago in an issue of the journal Genetics, “Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution” (Durrett, R & Schmidt, D. 2008. Genetics 180: 1501-1509). This is the fourth of five posts that discusses it. Cited references will appear in the last post.

Now I’d like to turn to a couple of other points in Durrett and Schmidt’s reply which aren’t mistakes with their model, but which do reflect conceptual errors. As I quote in a previous post, they state in their reply, “This conclusion is simply wrong since it assumes that there is only one individual in the population with the first mutation.” I have shown previously that, despite their assertion, my conclusion is right. But where do they get the idea that “it assumes that there is only one individual in the population with the first mutation”? I wrote no such thing in my letter about “one individual”. Furthermore, I “assumed” nothing. I merely cited empirical results from the literature. The figure of 1 in 10^20 is a citation from the literature on chloroquine resistance of malaria. Unlike their model, it is not a calculation on my part.

Right after this, in their reply Durrett and Schmidt say that the “mistake” I made is a common one, and they go on to illustrate “my” mistake with an example about a lottery winner. Yet their own example shows they are seriously confused about what is going on.
The basic problem, as I noted here, referencing this controversy (oh, wait, there isn't a controversy, right?), is that for Darwinists, Dawinism is an omnipotent force which cannot by its very nature have limitations. So Behe, who speaks of limitations, speaks blasphemies.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:





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