[SirLinksalot]

I read the abstract of the web page you gave...

I think you are mis-reading Michael Behe. If he indeed believed in macro-evolution, he would have said so. That paper you cited does not in any way show how novel cell types, tissue types, organs, or body plans could be created by random mutation.

In Michael Behe’s Recent Book : The Edge of Evolution. He offers hard evidence for what most people recognize. (Those who have been blinded by Darwinist indoctrination are obviously excluded.)

Mutations break things. However, on occasion, with huge probabilistic resources, a broken thing can promote survival in a specific environment (e.g., bacterial antibiotic resistance).

But broken things represent a downhill process, informationally, and cannot account for an uphill, information-creating process, not to mention the machinery required to process that information.

Understanding this is not difficult, unless one has a nearly pathological commitment to the notion that design in the universe and living systems cannot possibly exist.

Don’t get me wrong Michael Behe Behe accepts that cumulative selection happens. At issue is the SUFFICIENCY and UBIQUITY of the mechanism. Behe make a good case that what is claimed as innovation is more akin to DESTRUCTION.

It is like one army blowing up it’s own bridges in an attempt to slow and invasion. The affects of blowing up multiple bridges are cumulative, but not innovative.

In fact When Behe discusses pyrimethamine for instance, he is not only acknowledging the effects of cumulative mutations, but also highlighting with the specific case that even these beneficial mutations can have a net negative effect on the organism. In order to achieve the added resistance of the new mutations protein function is lost.

In order to make the new mutations selectable the virus must simultaneously acquire an independent mutation to compensate for this loss.

Behe acknowledges the existence of the cumulative effect, investigates the actual empirical evidence, compares this to the huge population of mutating malaria, and draws his conclusions based upon the relevant data.

He also discusses in one chapter of his book the very Darwinian hypothesis for the existence of anti-freeze in the blood of the Notothenioids. Gene duplication, cumulative beneficial mutations, and even a serendipitous deletion.

Here is what he said :

“Instead of pointing to greater things, as Darwinists hoped, the antifreeze protein likely marks the far border of what we can expect of random mutation in vertebrates.” -— page 82

This is what his book is about - what Darwinian evolution can do, and WHAT IT CANNOT. What it cannot is what I said — create NOVEL TISSUE TYPES, ORGANS OR BODY PARTS.

Behe also said :

“…random variation doesn’t explain the most basic features of biology. It doesn’t explain the elegant, sophisticated molecular machinery that undergirds life. To account for that - and to account for the root and thick branches of the tree of common descent - multiple coherent mutations are needed.
…
Most mutations that built the great structures of life must have been non-random.”

page 83

So please, don’t use Behe as your advocate. He knows what he’s talking about and he has researched the issue and is quite honest about it. If he agreed with you, he would have
not have been an ID proponent. The man may be many other things but he ain’t stupid.

[Abd al-Rahiim]

In an editorial, Dr. Behe states that to certain people, common descent is often the first thing associated with evolution. He states that he has no problem with common descent, which he defines as "the idea that all organisms living and dead are related by common ancestry." We can thus infer that Dr. Behe is not against macroevolution.

That paper you cited does not in any way show how novel cell types, tissue types, organs, or body plans could be created by random mutation.

From the abstract

Gene duplication is thought to be a major source of evolutionary innovation because it allows one copy of a gene to mutate and explore genetic space while the other copy continues to fulfill the original function...Yet some protein features, such as disulfide bonds or ligand binding sites, require the participation of two or more amino acid residues, which could require several mutations. Here we model the evolution of such protein features by what we consider to be the conceptually simplest route—point mutation in duplicated genes.

I forgot that you didn't include "protein features" in your list of things that lack empirical evidence. My fault.

This is what his book is about - what Darwinian evolution can do, and WHAT IT CANNOT. What it cannot is what I said — create NOVEL TISSUE TYPES, ORGANS OR BODY PARTS.

You're absolutely correct here. Darwin proposed natural selection as the mechanism for evolution. He did not talk about mutations because he did not know about them. They were not synthesized into the theory of evolution until the twentieth century. Natural selection cannot create anything new. No biologist contests this. Mutations, though, can.