David Klinghoffer thinks Science had to gang up on Behe

For even more fun, David Klinghoffer has written his own criticism of the Science review. His take is even more petty and ridiculous: he thinks science is having a panic attack over the book, because they got three scientists to write the review.

So here we have Science, the most prestigious technical science journal published in the United States, getting out ahead of the release of Darwin Devolves, recruiting a National Academy of Sciences member and two lesser scientists, the latter known primarily for their critiques of intelligent design (Swamidass) or complaints about the “poor design” of the human body (Lents).

Lesser scientists? What does that make Behe?

I guarantee you that Lenski does not think of his colleagues as lesser, and that the Science editors did not recruit a group to triple-team Behe because he’s so darned scary and tough. It’s much more likely that a trio of colleagues were discussing the book, and each contributed cogent criticisms, so they got equal billing in the write-up. That’s how real science works, when it works well — collaborative groups contributing to the work.

Behe might not be aware of this because he’s been ostracized by real scientists, and he only bounces ideas off fellow ideologues at the Discovery Institute, who tend to get horny over anything critical of evolution, no matter how ridiculous. The collaborative nature of science might be difficult for the DI pundits to comprehend.

Oh, and even us lesser scientists are quite capable of seeing how bad Behe’s arguments have always been.

Michael Behe declares victory after being stomped flat

Behe is crowing over the Science review of his new book. The man is deeply delusional.

…the overwhelmingly important point to notice right up front is that the reviewers (Lenski plus Josh Swamidass over at Peaceful Science and John Jay College biologist Nathan Lents) have absolutely no response to the very central argument of the book. The argument that I summarized as an epigraph on the first page of the book so no one could miss it. The one that I included in the title of a 2010 Quarterly Review of Biology article upon which the book is based. The one for which I chose the most in-your-face moniker that I could think of (consistent with the professional literature) to goad a response: The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution: Break or blunt any gene whose loss would increase the number of offspring. The rule summarizes the fact that the overwhelming tendency of random mutation is to degrade genes, and that very often is helpful. Thus natural selection itself acts as a powerful de-volutionary force, increasing helpful broken and degraded genes in the population.
And they had no response! That’s because there is in fact nothing that can alleviate that fatal flaw in Darwinism.

So the central claim of his book is that sometimes, gene loss can be adaptive, something that no competent evolutionary biologist would consider a remarkable claim. Of course, they would disagree with his implication that that is the only process allowed or that no mutation could increase complexity or that novel functions can not increase the fitness of an individual. Contrary to Behe’s laughable claim that Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski had no response to his central tenet, they did: they pointed out that he ignores the various ways evolution proceeds (it’s not just by “breaking” genes), and that he runs away from the evidence of clear examples of mutations that increase complexity.

Behe is skeptical that gene duplication followed by random mutation and selection can contribute to evolutionary innovation. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that this underlies trichromatic vision in primates, olfaction in mammals, and developmental innovations in all metazoans through the diversification of HOX genes. And in 2012, Andersson et al. showed that new functions can rapidly evolve in a suitable environment. Behe acknowledges none of these studies, declaring an absence of evidence for the role of duplications in innovation.

Because they politely pointed out instances where his First Rule of Adaptive Evolution falls flat on its face without explicitly saying it’s wrong by name, Behe thinks they didn’t respond to it — I guess he needs it said literally. So here, I’ll help, I’m not very polite. Behe’s First Rule of Adaptive Evolution is stupid and wrong, isn’t a real rule, and we have multiple examples that refute it, which Behe doesn’t comprehend, because he’s an ignoramus about evolution.

Strange people, those ancaps

A man, John Galton, was murdered in Acapulco. The proximate reason: he was growing marijuana in Mexico, and the drug cartels wanted to shut him down. The ultimate cause: he was deeply involved in the anarcho-capitalism cult.

Anarcho-capitalists (“ancaps”) believe in dismantling the state and allowing unchecked capitalism to govern the world in its place. Even within the small anarchist world, ancaps are fringe. Anarchists typically describe their movement as inherently anti-capitalist. Their philosophy describes anarchy as the rejection of hierarchical structures, which they say capitalism enforces. Anarcho-capitalists, meanwhile, see money as a liberating force. They promote a variety of libertarian causes like using cryptocurrency, legalizing all drugs, and privatizing all public institutions like courts and roads. The movement reveres the novelist Ayn Rand, whose work outlines a philosophy of radical selfishness and individualism. Her best-known character, an idealized capitalist named John Galt, appears to have inspired Galton’s name.

Peter Kropotkin wept. It’s all a fraud, with everyone involved desperately trying to con people out of money. They’re into cryptocurrency, drugs, and various paper-shuffling schemes, all of which rely on parasitizing other people’s wealth instead of generating their own, and they carry a lot of weird baggage.

They made their money off Forester’s hand-blown smoking paraphernalia and fundraised on their frequent blog posts. They adopted a dog named Rebel and a cat named Satoshi (named after the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin). The pair hosted “meat-ups” for people interested in carnivorism, an all-flesh diet popular in some right-wing and libertarian circles, particularly among libertarians with an interest in cryptocurrency.

The unofficial leader of their community of selfish expatriates, Jeff Berwick, is also a notorious con artist.

Berwick’s passport company, TDV Passports, also appears to have stumbled. The site used to sell “professional facilitation services for those seeking to establish citizenship in countries abroad.” In practical terms, that meant putting clients in touch with people who could fast-track immigration and citizenship applications. Various versions of the site charged from $12,000 for the Dominican Republic citizenship process to $40,000 in “legal fees” for U.S. citizenship. The company appears frequently on scam-reporting websites, where alleged TDV Passports customers complained of spending tens of thousands of dollars without ever obtaining immigration documents.

He’s also running a conference which will feature Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano, and charges extravagant fees for everything — it’s another scam. But what I thought most revealing was his comment on the horrifying murder of his friend:

Anarchapulco will go on as scheduled next week and might be even bigger due to the murder, Berwick says.

“We’ve received nothing but love from attendees and expect this will not affect attendance in a negative way at all,” he said. “In fact, it could increase attendance as more people are exposed to our message this week due to media coverage of this tragic event.”

I suppose you don’t have to be a sociopath to be an ancap, but it sure helps.

My flabber is now gasted

How stunningly ignorant are Fox News hosts? Let’s see Pete Hegseth’s disgusting confession:

Following a commercial break, Fox & Friends co-host Jedediah Bila revealed that Hegseth had been munching on day-old pizza that was left on the set.

Pizza Hut lasts for a long time, Hegseth replied, defending himself. My 2019 resolution is to say things on air that I say off air. I don’t think I’ve washed my hands for 10 years. Really, I don’t really wash my hands ever.

I inoculate myself, he continued. Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them. Therefore, they’re not real.

Hegseth argued that his unsanitary habit leaves him immune to sickness.

Uh…say what?

I remember when my father came home, he had this can of gritty gray goop that was basically an industrial degreaser, and also a pumice stone, that he’d use to scrub the grime out of his hands. Maybe Hegseth’s problem is that he’s never really worked? (Also, the sharp, astringent smell of that stuff is one of the things I remember about my dad. I also know that it really bugged him that his hands were calloused and dark with hard work.)

As for the germs “not real” remark, when I was doing animal surgeries long ago, I learned how to do a thorough scrub — it mattered. The first time you have to scrub pus out of an incision on a kitten you learn to take sterile technique seriously.

Of course, you can see germs. All you need is a good microscope. One of the banes of my experiments with grasshopper embryos was that you really did require sterile technique to work with them, because there was so much yolky tastiness that bacteria would thrive on. I’d sterilize all the work surfaces with alcohol, I’d use sterile media, I would wipe down the microscope objectives with alcohol, and still when doing multi-hour observations I’d see the medium grow cloudy, I’d see the little nests of bacteria proliferate, I’d even watch grasshopper hemocytes dart in and phagocytize them. Germs are real.

It’s a routine experiment in microbiology classes to have students take swabs of various surfaces, including their hands, and then culture the results on a growth medium. It’s disgusting. Ask any microbiologist. I’ve been to conferences where you can spot the micro people: they’re the ones who wash their hands before they use the bathroom, and then wash them again when they leave.

I work with young people all the time — college students are not quite as bad as preschoolers, but you do get exposed to a lot of infectious agents. Years ago I found that I could reduce my frequency of illness by thoroughly scrubbing my hands first thing in the morning, and washing once again before I went home. It’s also routine before doing a lot of routine experiments: I scrub up before setting up fruit fly cultures, for instance, and I’ve noticed that my fly bottles have virtually no contamination compared to those of some of my students.

I do appreciate Hegseth confessing to how filthy and unsanitary he is. I guess I’ll have to refuse any requests to appear on Fox & Friends in the future.

FtB has never had internet drama like this

You sometimes hear gloating accusations that the “Left is eating its own” or that liberals are addicted to drama or that right-wingers know how to coordinate their messaging. Next time you hear that, think of the behavior of alt-right wackaloons Ian Miles Cheong, Andy “Warski” Pires, Jean-François Gariépy, and a swarm of other racist goons. It’s got pro wrestling, Nazis, accusations of pedophilia, SWATting, and guys setting their own nipples on fire. They aren’t going after leftists, but each other. It’s all very amusing.

Behe…yeah, he’s over and done with

When Michael Behe published Darwin’s Black Box, there was a loud “Huzzah!” from the creationists — they had new buzzwords, like “irreducible complexity”, for the first time in 50 years, and they had a scientist with a legitimate Ph.D. to cite as an authority claiming evolution couldn’t happen. The “science” was crap, but it was a strong rhetorical play, and we had to respond vigorously to it. It was garbage, but all the back-and-forth enhanced Behe’s reputation. I read it thoroughly and contributed to online discussions about the fallacies in it.

Then he came out with a second book, The Edge of Creation, and the creationists all went “huzzah?”, because there was nothing new in it, no spark of rhetorical flourish they could use in debates, but there was an implication that caused them worries. Behe was claiming you could see the hand of the Designer in ongoing processes, and that It was actively engineering diseases and parasites to kill us right now. Whoops. It was still garbage, but it didn’t trigger a surge of creationist activity that needed refutation. I skimmed it, threw it aside, ignored it.

Now he has a third book, Darwin Devolves, where he returns to the same old stagnant, tainted well and says the same old things, and it’s only going to inspire the die-hard Behe fanchildren, and isn’t going to challenge any scientists at all. I’m not going to pick up a copy. Not going to read it. Not going to critique it. Everything has already been said, he has nothing new that we need to refute, and he’s nothing but yet another crackpot…just one who has a tenured position at a legitimate university, even if he is something of a pariah to his colleagues.

But because he got creationists excited 20 years ago, someone had to suffer through his book for Science magazine, and the sacrificial victims are Nathan Lents, Joshua Swamidass, and Richard Lenski, who write that a biochemist’s crusade to overturn evolution misrepresents theory and ignores evidence.

Behe is skeptical that gene duplication followed by random mutation and selection can contribute to evolutionary innovation. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that this underlies trichromatic vision in primates, olfaction in mammals, and developmental innovations in all metazoans through the diversification of HOX genes. And in 2012, Andersson et al. showed that new functions can rapidly evolve in a suitable environment. Behe acknowledges none of these studies, declaring an absence of evidence for the role of duplications in innovation.

Behe asserts that new functions only arise through “purposeful design” of new genetic information, a claim that cannot be tested. By contrast, modern evolutionary theory provides a coherent set of processes—mutation, recombination, drift, and selection—that can be observed in the laboratory and modeled mathematically and are consistent with the fossil record and comparative genomics.

Deja vu, man. These are exactly the complaints everyone made about Darwin’s Black Box: he didn’t seem to understand modern evolutionary theory, he ignored the multiple mechanisms of evolutionary change, he blithely pretended the evidence against his thesis didn’t exist, and he just sailed on, smug in his ignorance. Nothing has changed. His formula is the same. The same counter-arguments still apply.

Let’s all just ignore this rehash, OK?