Biochemist Michael Behe, author of The Edge of Evolution, continues to politely but firmly embarrass his critics at his Amazon blog. So far he has taken on Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, and Ken Miller and left the corpses of their arguments, such as they are, littering the field.
Behe has accomplished something truly noteworthy. The debate between IDers and Darwinists had pretty much ground to a standstill because Darwinists could always say that, as improbable as the machinery of the cell might be, natural selection working in tandem with random mutation could achieve wonders, and, of course, there was no hard evidence that they were wrong.
The Darwinians believed in the power of NS+RM and the IDers, relying heavily upon intuition and probability, demurred. Now Behe has advanced the argument by showing that, based upon new empirical data, there is good reason to think that a limit exists to how much genetic novelty can be introduced into the genome through random genetic mutation. In other words what hard evidence we have points to there being an edge, or boundary, to how much evolutionary progress can be made through undirected blind processes, and it's not much.
The inference is clear. If complex life, including man, has evolved from metazoan ancestors it can only be because the changes necessary to produce increasing complexity were not blind at all, but were intentional. And if they were intentional they were the product of a mind.
The Edge of Evolution drives yet another nail into the coffin of materialistic, naturalistic Darwinism, and that's why the book is so important and why the critics are so hostile. The hostility is not directed at Behe because he denies evolutionary descent from common ancestors, because he doesn't. It's directed at him because he denies and exposes the materialist religion that underlies the science of so many Darwinists.
RLC