The work needs to be done regardless. You can't go on forever with playground arguments. (No, you will never cover everything but it should be very rich ground.) You have to be able to come up with a specific and plausible evolutionary path for any and every cellular mechanism. I keep hearing how evolution has implications and has helped push science forward, but even cogent arguments are ultimately worthless next to real work. Miller's arguments seem pretty cogent to me, plus I've never been much for arguments from ignorance.
On what basis do you label him ignorant? This thread is going on 200 replies and no one has bothered to actually refute Behe beyond calling him names. The refutation would be: Post a list of what Behe says doesn't exist (real work into the biochemical evolution of protein mechanisms) or take one of his examples and show how it evolved (or could have evolved.)
But they're very often right answers to something.
They don't have to be right answers to anything, but they can at worst only be mildly harmful. And Behe is far more specific than a large scale system like feathers. But even allowing this, you still can't assume that every necessary change is not harmful, you need to show it.
That's one of the mistakes anti-evolutionists often make: thinking that an organism gets one chance at developing the right mutation, and that only one individual develops it.
Behe is asking the exact opposite question you are accusing "anti-evolutionists" of asking -- how did this come about in a stepwise fashion. And posing a large scale system like feathers is doing exactly what you accuse others of doing: The scale of DNA changes for something like that is enormous. I see no point in speculating at that scale until you address far simpler (but still hideous complex) evolution of interacting protein mechanisms.
Well, yes. And those thousands of papers exDemMom keeps suggesting people read? That's where the work is being done.
You have to be able to come up with a specific and plausible evolutionary path for any and every cellular mechanism.
Or what? Or that proves evolution didn't happen? Until we fill in every gap in the theory, we should assume it's wrong? It's a good thing medical science doesn't work that way.
This is what I mean by an argument from ignorance. It's not that Behe is necessarily personally ignorant; it's that he points to what we don't know and insists we can never know it. Is he out there doing the work of trying to figure out how the blood clotting mechanism evolved; or on the other hand, is he looking for evidence of where, when, and how the intelligent designer intervened to install it? Not as far as I've ever heard.
The refutation would be: Post a list of what Behe says doesn't exist (real work into the biochemical evolution of protein mechanisms) or take one of his examples and show how it evolved (or could have evolved.)
First of all, notice how you (and Behe) are asking people to prove something did happen that he says couldn't. If he were really interested in doing the work, he'd offer a testable explanation of what he thinks did happen and make some predictions based on it that other people could try and confirm. But instead all he does is snipe. (Kind of like my ex-wife, who was much better at explaining what was wrong with all my ideas than she was at coming up with ideas of her own.)
Second, if you want an explanation of how one of his examples could have evolved, look up Ken Miller, as I suggested before, or just Google "irreducible complexity debunked."