I don't see where Behe is at all skeptical of Lenski's work. Behe in fact specifically brings up Lenski's work, and says if anything cool came out of it, that would convince him. And Lenski says something cool has in fact come out of it. We'll have a wait a couple of weeks to find out what that is.
Behe said he might find the mainstream scientists' argument compelling if they were to observe evolutionary leaps in the laboratory. He pointed to an experiment by Richard Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University, who has been observing the evolution of E. coli bacteria for more than 15 years. "If anything cool came out of that," Behe said, "that would be one way to convince me."
Behe said that if he was correct, then the E. coli in Lenski's lab would evolve in small ways, but would never change in such a way that the bacteria would develop entirely new abilities.
In fact, that is what appears to have happened. Lenski said his experiment was not intended to explore this aspect of evolution, but "we have recently discovered a pretty dramatic exception, one where a new and surprising function has evolved," he said.
There is a way to settle this, however, because like Behe's irreducible complexity, the concept of specified complexity can also be tested."If Dembski were right, then a new gene with new information conferring a brand new function on an organism could never come into existence without a designer because a new function requires complex specified information," Miller said.
In 1975, Japanese scientists reported the discovery of bacteria that could break down nylon, the material used to make pantyhose and parachutes. Bacteria are known to ingest all sorts of things, everything from crude oil to sulfur, so the discovery of one that could eat nylon would not have been very remarkable if not for one small detail: nylon is synthetic; it didn't exist anywhere in nature until 1935, when it was invented by an organic chemist at the chemical company Dupont. The discovery of nylon-eating bacteria poses a problem for ID proponents. Where did the CSI for nylonasethe actual protein that the bacteria use to break down the nyloncome from?
Behe said, "I'll wait and see."
That's not being skeptical?