Ethics

Behe's Vapid Response to Lenski Paper

By Ed Brayton

Last week I mentioned the new paper by Richard Lenski at MSU, which showed that an unselected mutation could fix in a population and then later combine with a second mutation to produce a new trait that can be selected for. Now Michael Behe has written a silly and substance-free "critique" of the Lenski paper, the second time Behe has tangled with Lenski and come out looking absurd.

The thing that jumps out about Behe's response is that it's really not a response at all. He ignores all the relevant things about the experiment, highlights the one thing everyone knew to be true long before this experiment, and declares victory. Here's the sum total of the substance of his response:

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on June 11, 2008 (boomark / email).