>>Call it the principle of malignant reading. He’s been doing it for years with the arguments of Darwin’s Black Box, and he continues it in this review. For example, despite being repeatedly told by me and others that by an “irreducibly complex” system I mean one in which removal of a part destroys the function of the system itself, Miller says, no, to him the phrase will mean that none of the remaining parts can be used for anything else <<
This Behe looking backwards rather than forward.
Its not important if the removal of a piece causes the whole to fail at its new functions. The questions whether the individual pieces could all have developed with useful purposes.
This could be an oversight or a mistake on his part - I don’t any maliciousness in his error.
I think you missed the point which was that the reviewer was substituting his own definition of a technical phrase, drawing erroneous conclusions based on his substitution, and then holding the author responsible. If this happened a single time as a result of misunderstanding, then one could point out the error and hope that the next time would be different. However, if it happens again and again, in spite of having been corrected, then there is something else going on. When it’s happening in a polemic, then the likeliest explanation is something akin to maliciousness.