Complex biochemical systems slap Behe upside the head

Ian Musgrave does a wonderful job explaining the recent Science paper on the evolution of hormone binding sites. This is the work that Behe has called “piddling”, and claims that it has no relevance to the evolvability of complex biochemical systems. Ian takes this idea apart with a quick tour of the wandering goalposts of irreducible complexity:

Behe and the Discovery Insitute have reacted quickly and negatively to this paper. But in doing so they display a curious amnesia. Behe says:

I certainly would not classify their system as IC. The IC systems I discussed in Darwin’s Black Box contain multiple, active protein factors. Their “system”, on the other hand, consists of just a single protein and its ligand.”

Yet this “system” is precisely the thing that Behe uses in his exemplar for the Behe and Snoke paper, the binding of DPG to haemoglobin. And Behe has said in testimony to the Dover trial that the Behe and Snoke paper on evolution of binding sites is about irreducible complexity. So if the evolution of the DPG binding site (where you only need two mutations to make a functioning DPG binding site) is an example of IC, then the evolution of the aldosterone binding site is also.

Poor Behe. The man continues his ever-accelerating slide into the land of pathetic jokes.

Make-work for creationists

Creationists are always carping about that darned methodological naturalism and how we don’t make room for supernatural explanations. How about if we make a deal: we’ll reserve the boring ol’ natural explanations for things like Tiktaalik, and the creationists can move on to bring their deep knowledge of the supernatural to bear on more relevant questions, like Divine Evolution? That should keep them occupied for a while.

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Now they’ve done it—they’ve got the Royal Society angry

There will be a webcast by Steven Jones tomorrow at 1730 GMT, titled “Why Creationism is Wrong and Evolution is Right” (ooo, nice sharp title), for anyone interested. I think that means it’s going to be on at 11:30AM CST, unfortunately…I’ll be in class. Even though I’m going to have to miss it, it sounds like the Royal Society is gearing up to pound on creationism, which is always a good thing.

Flibbertigibbet Dembski

Now he’s moving again, from the prestigious Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville to the eminent Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

If you ask me, they’ve both got “theological” and “seminary” in their name, so who cares? He’s moved from one dunghill to another.

Beckwith’s tenure decision

More details are dribbling out about the decision to deny Francis Beckwith tenure. It’s a little bit odd, because these things are supposed to be confidential, and I will note that Beckwith, to his credit, is not commenting on the decision while trying to appeal it. I hope his appeal does not succeed, however. I agree completely with this fellow, Dr Jim Patton, who clearly states a legitimate reason for kicking Beckwith out (warning: Free Republic link):

When tenure time approached, the anti-Sloan [Sloan was the former Baylor president who had hired Dembski and Beckwith] interim president, William Underwood, appointed psychology professor Jim Patton, the chair of the anti-Sloan faculty senate, to Mr. Beckwith’s tenure committee. In an e-mail message about another faculty member shown to WORLD, Mr. Patton wrote, “I clearly do not think highly of anyone who claims ID theory is science.”

I get to vote on tenure decisions at my university, and I can assure you that if someone comes up who claims that ID ‘theory’ is science, I will vote against them. If someone thinks the sun orbits around the earth, I will vote against them. If someone thinks fairies live in their garden and pull up the flowers out of the ground every spring, I will vote against them. Tenure decisions are not pro forma games, but a process of evaluation, and I’d rather not have crackpots promoted. Beckwith may be a nice fellow with a commendable publication record, but when it gets right down to it, his untenable position on intelligent design puts him smack in the middle of the tinfoil hat brigade. And that position on ID is a focus of many of his publications, so it is certainly a legitimate criterion for judging him.

(Before the inevitable trollish twit starts claiming this is a sign of intolerance, I’ll short circuit that by stating that whether a person is Christian or Muslim or atheist, Republican or Democrat or Green, is not an issue in tenure decisions and would not be and has not been a factor in any tenure votes I’ve cast. I do not object to differences in opinion among my colleagues. I do object to keeping fools around.)

Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy

Poor Dr Dino, AKA Kent Hovind, AKA batshit crazy fundy guy, is a notorious tax cheat, and now the law has finally caught up with him. “Dinosaur Adventure Land” has been shut down, and he risks fines and the possibility of buildings being razed.

You know, Al Capone was taken down for tax evasion, too. As long as malicious stupidity isn’t criminal in this country, I’ll accept this strategy as one way to get Mr Hovind put away where he can stop doing harm.

(via The Panda’s Thumb)

Hovind schadenfreude

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(Since Kent Hovind is in the news for tax evasion again, I thought it would be nice to bring this article over here to the shiny new site.)

Ah, the continuing saga of Kent Hovind’s criminal industries…Hovind is an inexplicably popular creationist who, in addition to his dedication to creationist absurdities, has this devout belief that as a minister of Jesus, he is a resident of a celestial, Christian nation independent of the secular government of the United States, i.e., he doesn’t have to pay taxes. Ever. On anything. And little things like zoning laws? Pffft. They don’t apply to him. Only Jesus’s law counts, and conveniently enough, Jesus says that Kent gets to keep all of his money. (Isn’t it funny how Jesus, when he was alive, preached about rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, helped the poor and sick, and was sort of down on the wealthy and worldly? Now that he’s dead, he’s had a change of heart and tells all his best friends to stockpile the moolah. I guess slow torture and execution turns people into Republicans.) (Hey, you don’t think…nah. Couldn’t be. Is the answer to WWJD, “Abu Ghraib”?)

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AiG on Tiktaalik

The Discovery Institute flailed about hopelessly trying to deny the value of Tiktaalik (which, as commenters pointed out, is kind of weird in itself—I thought ID didn’t deny the facts of evolution, just the mechanisms), but what about those forthright creationists at Answers in Genesis? They also fall all over themselves to argue the bad, bad evidence away. Read the Lancelet’s rebuttal to see Menton wrung out like dishrag.

The interesting thing about all this is that the Menton and Looy are simply pointing out that Tiktaalik has attributes of a fish, but doing nothing to dispute the observed similarities with tetrapods. Has it ever dawned on them that an animal somewhere between fishes and tetrapods might actually have some attributes of a fish? What makes me wonder is why AiG didn’t post a picture of the specimen. There are, by now, tons of pictures on media websites all over the place. A Google image search for “tiktaalik” turns out four pages of results. Here’s why: they’re scared, deathly scared. The implications of Tiktaalik are so bloody obvious that they have a lot of work to do in order to deal with this one.

Give ’em time. They’ll figure out yet another dishonest line of patter to babble out while keeping their eyes clamped tightly shut.

The Discovery Institute on Tiktaalik

The poor babies in Seattle are in a state of denial.

These fish are not intermediates, explain Discovery Institute scientists I queried about the find. Tiktaalik roseae is one of a set of lobe-finned fishes that include very curious mosaics–these fishes have advanced characteristics of several different groups. They are not intermediates in the sense that they are half-fish/half-tetrapod. Rather, they have some tetrapod-like features. The anatomical characters of Tiktaalik and similar taxa were “coded” and analyzed by a computer program. Because of the presence of some advanced characters, the analysis placed Tiktaalik next to a group of tetrapod-like fishes. What is clear is that forms like Tiktaalik are a melange of primitive and more developed features.

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