critique

Dear Readers, In a long book review in The New Republic, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne calls Brown University cell biologist Ken Miller a creationist. No surprise there — “creationist” has a lot of negative emotional resonance in many intellectual circles, so it makes a fellow’s rhetorical task a lot easier if he can tag his intellectual opponent with the label. (Kind of like calling someone a “communist” back in the 1950s.) No need for the hapless “creationist” to be a Biblical literalist, or to believe in a young earth, or to be politically or socially conservative, or have any other attribute the general public thinks of when they hear the “C” word. For Coyne, one just has to think that Read More ›

Dear Readers, Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, has written a new book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, in which he defends Darwinism, attacks intelligent design, and makes a case for theistic evolution (defined as something like “God used Darwinian evolution to make life”). In all this, it’s pretty much a re-run of his previous book published over a decade ago,Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution. So if you read that book, you’ll have a very good idea of what 90% of the new book concerns. For people who think that a mousetrap is not irreducibly complex because parts of it can be used as Read More ›

This is the fifth of five posts in which I reply to Dr. Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. Finally, Dr. Musgrave objects to my placing viral protein – cellular protein interactions in a separate category from cellular protein-cellular protein interactions. In Chapter 8 of The Edge of Evolution I had written: Another, more important point to note is that I’m considering just cellular proteins binding to other cellular proteins, not to foreign proteins. Foreign proteins injected into a cell by an invading virus or bacterium make up a different category. The foreign proteins of pathogens almost always are intended to cripple a cell in any way possible. Since there are so many more ways Read More ›

This is the fourth of five posts in which I reply to Dr. Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. And now let’s talk about Dr. Musgrave’s “core argument,” that subsequent to the virus leaping to humans from chimps Vpu developed the ability to act as a viroporin, allowing the leakage of cations which helps release the virus from the cell membrane. Yes, I’m perfectly willing to concede that this does appear to be the development of a new viral protein-viral protein binding site, one which I overlooked when writing about HIV. So the square point in Figure 7.4 representing HIV should be placed on the Y axis at a value of one, instead Read More ›

This is the third of five posts in which I reply to Dr. Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. In my reply to Smith I quoted from a review (3) which asked the question why, with so much genetic variation, do we just see “interesting variations” in biological properties. Smith, replying to me on her blog in high dudgeon, quotes the next paragraph of the review which details some of those interesting variations: The long terminal repeat region (LTR) of the HIV genome regulates transcription and viral replication, acting as a promoter responsive to the viral Tat protein. Although all subtypes share the same LTR function, they differ with respect to LTR sequence Read More ›

This is the second of five posts in which I reply to Dr. Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. Musgrave: But by far the worst, you ignored her core argument. That in the space of a decade HIV-1 Vpu developed a series of binding sites that made it a viroporin, a multisubunit structure with a function previously absent from HIV-1. Behe: It is not clear to me why you call that Smith’s “core argument.” In her post, her writing meanders quite a bit; it’s hard for me to glean what she thinks is most important. After sneering a bit at me, Smith began her post by asserting that vpu is a “new” gene (even though Read More ›

This is the first of five posts in which I reply to Professor Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. Musgrave: Dear Dr. Behe I have recently read your response to Abbie Smith’s article on the HIV-1 protein VPU. Ms Smith showed how Vpu’s recently evolved viroporin activity directly contradicts your statement that HIV has evolved no new biding sites since it entered humans (Edge of Evolution, page 143 and figure 7.4, page 144 ). I was greatly disappointed in your response. I must admit to having a special involvement in this case. Firstly, I drew the illustrations for Ms Smith’s article, and its follow up. But secondly, as a member of my professional Read More ›

Dear Readers, Tonight concludes my response to University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, which began earlier this week.  As you know if you’ve been following my blog here, Professor Coyne reviewed my new book Edge of Evolution in The New Republic.  I replied to his response here, and he has responded to my reply at TalkReason.org.  Because it quickly gets awkward to include all of the context here, I’m only quoting the portions of his response that I specifically address here.  Readers who want to see the full back-and-forth should read his posted review and response. Coyne: The reviews by Ken Miller in Nature and Sean Carroll in Science cite several examples of the gradual origin of adaptations via the step-by-step accumulation of point mutations in proteins. Behe: Hardly. Read More ›