Posted: Dec 21, 2010 11:29 pm
Weaver wrote:Behe’s implicit conclusion was that evolution in nature—and not just in bacteria and viruses, but all species—also occurred in this way; that is, brand-new genes or genetic elements (he calls them “FCTs”) could not originate de novo by mutation and natural selection, but had to be put there by the Intelligent Designer (aka God/Jebus). Behe did not, and could not, say this in the paper, but intelligent-design advocates certainly touted this conclusion (see here and here, for instance), and now Behe himself has said the same thing on his blog at Uncommon Descent:Behe wrote:. . . I was saying that, no matter what causes gain-of-FCT events to sporadically arise in nature (and I of course think the more complex ones likely resulted from deliberate intelligent design http://tinyurl.com/32n64xl), short-term Darwinian evolution will be dominated by loss-of-FCT, which is itself an important, basic fact about the tempo of evolution.
Note that here he doesn‘t limit this conclusion (which he conveniently omitted from the QRB paper) to bacteria and viruses.
In that case, Behe needs to read more scientific papers. Because the literature on de novo gene origination is expansive. This list of papers that I've known about for some time probably represents less than 1% of the available literature:
De Novo Origination Of A New Protein-Coding Gene In Saccharomyces cerevisiae by Jing Cai, Ruoping Zhao, Huifeng Jiang and Wen Wang, Genetics, 179: 487-496 (May 2008) [full paper downloadable from here]
Extensive De Novo Genomic Variation In Rice Introduced By Introgression From Wild Rice (Zizania latifolia Griseb.) by Yong-Ming Wang, Zhen-Ying dong, Zhoing-Juan Zhang, Xiu-Yun Lin, Ye Shen, Daowei Zhou and Bao Liu, Genetics, 170: 1945-1956 (August 2005) [full paper downloadable from here]
Novel Genes Derived From Noncoding DNA In Drosophila melanogaster Are Frequently X-Linked And Exhibit Testis-based Expression by Mia T. Levine, Corbin D. Jones, Andrew D. Kern, Heather A. Lindfors and David J. Begun, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 103(26): 9935-9939 (27th June 2006) [full paper downloadable from here]
Evidence For De Novo Evolution Of Testis-Expressed Genes In The Drosophila yakuba/Drosophila erecta Clade by David J. Begun, Heather A. Lindfors, Andrew D. Kern and Corbin D. Jones, Genetics, 176: 1131-1137 (June 2007) [full paper downloadable from here]
Evolution Of Enzymes For The Metabolism Of New Chemical Inputs Into The Environment by Lawrence P. Wackett, Journal of Biological Chemistry, 279(40): 41259-41264 (1st October 2004) [full paper downloadable from here]
Evolution Of Hydra, A Recently Evolved Testis-Expressed Gene With Nine Alternative First Exons In Drosophila melanogaster by Shou-Tao Chen, Hsin-Chien Cheng, Daniel A. Barbash and Hsiao-Pei Yang, PLoS Genetics, 3(7): 1131-1143 (July 2007) [full paper downloadable from her]
Recently Evolved Genes Identified From Drosophila yakuba And D. erecta Accessory Gland Expressed Sequence Tags by David J. Begun, Heather A. Lindfors, Melissa E. Thompson and Alisha K. Holloway, Genetics, 172: 1675-1681 (March 2006) [full paper downloadable from here]