Raw Fish - Here fishy, fishy, fishy...

"The sad mistake at the logical centre of this book is eerily reminiscent of a similar claim in Behe's 1996 book Darwin's Black Box. In this work he claimed that complex biochemical systems have a property he called "irreducible complexity". Irreducibly complex structures, such as the bacterial flagellum, could not have evolved because they lack any selectable function until all of their component parts are in place. As he wrote, "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional", since every part of such a system had to be in place for natural selection to favour it. Therefore, such structures must have been designed.

A nice argument, except for the annoying fact that it is wrong. Subsets of proteins nearly identical to those in the flagellum do indeed have selectable functions (Nature Rev. Microbiol. 4, 784–790; 2006), and the argument fails. In the same book, Behe also claimed that every component of the irreducibly complex vertebrate blood-clotting system had to be present for the system to work properly. That argument collapsed when Russell Doolittle's laboratory (Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 100, 7527–7532; 2003) showed that the puffer fish, Fugu, lacks at least three clotting factors and still has a workable system. Such failures in the science of the argument helped to send intelligent design to a defeat in the Dover trial, and they haunt it still."

"On average, for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would need to wait a hundred million times ten million years. Since that is many times the age of the universe, it's reasonable to conclude the following: No mutation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years."

"Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation "of the same complexity" occurring in the human line. He hasn't. What he has actually done is to determine the odds of these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously at precisely the same position in exactly the same gene in a single individual. He then leads his unsuspecting readers to believe that this spurious calculation is a hard and fast statistical barrier to the accumulation of enough variation to drive darwinian evolution."