Posted: Jan 25, 2015 10:24 pm
BooBoo wrote:You can read Behe's response to Ken Miller's criticism here:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/01/ke ... 92691.html
So Behe originally claims that K76T is strongly deleterious, and Miller responds that it's neutral. And in this response, Behe attacks the claim that it's neutral by pointing out that it's beneficial. That seemed a bit fishy in itself.
Simple soul that I am, I wondered if that mutation could be neutral in one situation, and beneficial in another.
So I took a quick look at Miller's fig 4, the diagram from the PNAS paper, and sure enough, it's been established to be neutral if you start from the unmodified HB3 strain, and beneficial if you go via the D39 strain first.
That's not even surprising - a mutation that does nothing much on its own, but does something else if it's preceded by another one, even less surprising since the previous mutation is in the very next amino acid.
Given that the whole thrust of the work on chloroquine resistance is that in all these pathways to the the resistant strain, the mutations are sequential, it seems to me that Behe is just continuing to miss the same point - and missing it in the same way as I'm seeing quite a bit in my travels on this sort of topic - find some minor point, misconstrue it with a lot of huffing and puffing, and then use the misconstrual to discredit the opponent.
Straining out a gnat, and swallowing a camel, in fact.
Would appreciate if one of the biologists could confirm whether if I've read this right..
*Edited for typos