What Darwinism Can't Do

Huxley »

Sun Oct 21, 2007 4:04 am Agree: 3   Disagree: 4

Colson sez: :Naturally, Dawkins accuses Behe of doing exactly what he does not do: Namely, he suggests that Behe states that where evolution reaches its limits, “God must step in to help.”

Behe does no such thing. What he does is provide a series of case studies, such as the malaria virus, the AIDS virus, and the human immune system, and shows what evolution did or did not do for them. For example, he shows that although human cells have evolved in many ways to combat malaria, many humans are still vulnerable to it—and in some cases, those human cells are even worse off than they were before. This means that evolution is not always as progressive as Darwinists would have us believe. As Behe puts it, what Dawkins and others have called an “arms race” is really much more like “trench warfare,” unleashing forces that can damage organisms as easily as it can help them. So evolution has its limits.

First of all, Chuckles, malaria is not a virus. It is a eukaryote protozoan of the Class Sporozoa.

Second, you (and Behe) seem to have a very weak understanding of what goes on when evolution involves a symbiotic relationship, especially a parasitic and pathogenic one as in malaria. Evolution occurs on BOTH sides of the ball. The malaria parasite is evolving in response to changes in the defense responses of the human hosts. Humans cannot produce a system of defense that malaria can't break because the malaria organism responds to each "improvement" in the human (or any other kind of host-parasite relationship). There is no progress in evolution, only change. Whether Darwin understood that evolution is not progressive depends on what his understanding of "progress" was. In order for a thing to make progress, there must be some kind of end toward which such progress is made. No one has ever found any such teleologic end or purpose in the universe or for the universe. Evolution is understood not to be progressive and your statement that Darwinists would have you believe that it is, is a lie. I thought you were a believer in the Ten Commandments. What happened to the one about lying?

Behe's "trench warfare" term, is totally vacuous and irrelevant. Even in trench warfare, there are arms races between the armies. Better guns, better training, better artillery, tanks, gas warfare are all examlples of how trench warfare had its own arms races. For each advantage gained, there were responses that neutralized them. Gas masks were developed to respond to gas attacks, and tank traps and mines were responses to tanks. No, Behe is totally off.

And why haven't you read the Dover decision, Chuckles? In it, even a conservative Bush appointed judge could see right through Behe's misunderstandings and the Discovery Institute's lies.