It ain't rocket science... it's icky squooshy science

[essentialsaltes]

I'm delighted to see that some of my major beefs with Behe's Edge of Evolution (found in my mega-review) are quite similar to those offered by someone who actually knows what he's talking about: biologist Joe Thornton, whose work sheds light on the historical evolution of a cortisol receptor, one nucleotide at a time. Behe first called Thornton's work 'piddling', but later amended his judgment to 'great' once he decided that Thornton's work, which patiently shows how evolution can explain the phenomenon in a step by step process, actually shows that evolution can't explain it.

Anyway, Thornton has responded with a public letter, and I'm tickled to see the similarities - probability (especially after-the-fact probability), neutral mutation, telos. But again, Thornton has the distinct advantage of knowing what he's talking about and relevant scientific experiments to draw from.

Comments

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

If I were to be my least charitable, I'd call him a creationist concern troll. He has an actual Ph.D. in science, so he can't say anything too silly. He supports common descent and evolution up to a point, but he expresses some concerns that maybe evolution can't be the whole story -- more accurately, he strongly asserts that evolution is not the whole story -- and then plugs an Intelligent Designer into the concern gap.