Behe’s Edge of Evolution, part Ia

Let me add a quick addendum to the previous post. People aren’t appreciating yet how hard-core a designist Behe actually is; one comment mentions that “apparently God is directly responsible for the creation of drug-resistant malaria.”

No. The Designer, who must have godlike powers, specifically created malaria itself. The drug resistance is the one thing that evolved.

Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts. C-Eve’s children died in her arms because an intelligent agent deliberately made malaria, or at least something very similar to it.

Got that? Plasmodium falciparum was explicitly and intentionally constructed to infect, make ill, torment, and kill human beings. He goes farther than most YECs—the parasite was not simply a product of corruption at the Fall, it had to be carefully modified, built, and released to carry out its designed job of causing suffering.

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Behe’s Edge of Evolution, part I

I peeked.

I was reading Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, and I was several chapters into it. All he seemed to be saying was that evolution has limits, limits, limits, and those limits are so restrictive that you can’t get from there to here, and he was repeating it over and over, in this tediously chipper narrative voice. Behe insisted that he accepted common descent, though, and acknowledged all this evidence that, for instance, chimpanzees and humans are related by common descent, while saying that it was impossible for them to have evolved naturally from one to the other. So I was getting awfully curious to learn how they were linked by descent while evolution was impossible, and I jumped ahead to the end of the book.

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What next: txting it to a chat room?

This is not fair. Writing a doctoral thesis on a blog? How about doing your masters thesis on a wiki? Don’t these people know you’re supposed to suffer when writing a thesis?

I remember mine. There were months of tapping it out on an Apple II computer, and occasionally printing it out on the clumsy old dot-matrix printer so my advisor could rip into it and rearrange everything. Then, finally, I’d hook the computer up to the daisy wheel printer the department owned, and print out the good “final” copy for my committee—this had to be done late at night, because it took about 6 hours to print it all. Then the committee hacked it up, I revised it, then back to the daisy wheel for another late night. Then off to the dreaded grad school office, where the proofreader whipped out a ruler and told me one of the margins was off by a sixteenth of an inch…back to the daisy wheel. Then the defense, and “suggestions” for some additions…daisy wheel. Grad school office. Extra space between paragraphs on page 57. Back.

It was hellish. So now the whippersnappers are streamlining the instruments of torture? I don’t know that I approve.

(I’m sure someone is going to gasp, “You had a computer? We used a typewriter!” And then someone’s going to announce that they had to set hot type, and we’ll get the quill pen stories, and the real oldsters will whine about chiseling hieroglyphics. Save it. My pain and exasperation will always outweigh your minor inconveniences.)

Oh, there’s also some useful information in that article about what Nature considers the kind of prior publication that would preclude publishing a work in their journal.

Brain melting…

I want you all to know that I finished Michael Behe’s drecky The Edge of Evolution, and that I really will have a review up soon. Although, actually, I suppose I could put up a review right now:

Sucks.

But you probably want details, don’t you? So give me a little time to whittle this thing into shape. The book is awful throughout, and I’m more than a little embarrassed for Behe, who has just committed a whole pile of common creationist errors. Inane errors. Some errors so stupid I have to believe he’s intentionally trying to fool someone.

Does Steve Jobs read this blog or something?

My family of five has precisely four cell phones between them. Guess who’s the odd man out? I think Apple knows this, and have specifically targeted one of the ads for their new iPhone at me. This is horribly cruel. Not only is the ad focused on calamari, but wow, that gadget is sweet and elegant and had me thinking that I must own one, now. Hitting me with techno- and cephalo-lust at the same is no fair.

Fortunately, I have also seen the price, and I have seen my bank account, and I have seen my income, and that particular work of artfully hewn technology is squarely in the domain of economically impossible. But if I ever see someone with them, I’m going to ask them to find the nearest seafood restaurant for me, just because.

What fresh horror is this?

Literacity has the beginnings of a discussion of the horror genre, one of my favorite subjects (although I’m a bit picky—I’m a classic horror fan, and consider most of the recent offerings, both on screen and on the page, to be atrocity exhibitions rather than true horror), and one thing mentioned there is a taxonomy of horror stories. He argues that all are rooted in the idea of loss of control, and subdivides that into loss of control of self, the environment, and place in society…which was actually rather handy, because of the next item I discovered.

Gothic Lolitas. That’s right, twee and scary. This is one fashion movement that hasn’t hit Morris, fortunately, but then, I think Morris is still trying to lumber out of the 1970s.

Anyway, naming the horror is the first step to facing it, and thanks to my earlier discovery I was quickly able to categorize it as clearly an example of “loss of control of place in society”, subcategory “visions that no one will believe”.

Embassy embarrassment

So, I’m reading about this elaborate, extravagant erection to GW Bush’s ego being built in Iraq—

The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush’s intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale.

Rising from the dust of the city’s Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.

i-fe397e4a62c8121cd2c6b2532b7ccf10-evacuation.jpg

—sure, it’s got a movie theater, a swimming pool, a mansion, and all kinds of bomb-proof walls, but none of the important construction details are given. Is there a helipad on every roof? Are the stairs to the roof wide, sturdy, and sheltered from sniper fire? Are there provisions for rapid transport of essential documents to the roof? How about self-destruct mechanisms to clean up any confidential materials that have to be left behind?

I hope there are also some very strict standards on what kind of art is on display in the embassy. It’s so embarrassing when new tenants come along and laugh at your “psychotic porn”.

Egnor’s machine is uninhabited by any ghost

Egnor, the smug creationist neurosurgeon, is babbling again, but this time, it’s on a subject that he might be expected to have some credibility: the brain (he has one, and operates on them) and the mind (this might be a problem for him). It’s an interesting example of the religious pathology that’s going to be afflicting us for probably the next century — you see, creationism is only one symptom. We’re seeing an ongoing acceleration in scientific understanding that challenge the traditional truisms of the right wing religious culture warriors, and represent three fronts in our future battles.

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