I disagree.
According to Campbell and Reece, the authors of an introductory biology textbook, macroevolution is defined as change in allele frequencies at or above the species level.
Origin of life theories are certainly related to macroevolution. They depend on macroevolution, but the opposite is not true. Even if it were shown that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was responsible for creating the first prokaryote, it would not negate macroevolution. Change in allele frequencies at or above the species level has been readily observed. I believe many pages back I provided a novel example about meiosis errors in a plant resulting in offspring with polyploidy. If two organisms cannot produce viable offspring, then these two organisms belong to different species. The offspring with polyploidy cannot reproduce with other members of the parent species. Therefore, it is a different species. Macroevolution has occurred. This is but one example. The textbook I mentioned includes several more.
There is no empirical evidence whatsoever that Random Mutation can create novel cell types, tissue types, organs, or body plans.
Would you be surprised if I told you that one of the defense expert witnesses on “your side” wrote a paper that actually showed mutation could result in novel cell types?
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.