>> On the other hand, reading Molecular Biology of the Gene [Watson et al]
>> left me uninterested, yet reading Darwin's Black Box showed me just how
>> interesting molecular biology is, and gave me decent intuitive
>> metaphores for how this stuff actually works - something which the dense
>> scientific reference text did not.
>>
> Not that I would bet on the intuitive metaphors of some clown trying to
> argue against its corner stone, as useful.

Well, yeah, some of the stuff in the book is /obviously/ insane.

I remember being particularly shocked at the bit where he waives his 
hands around a bit, and then writes "now that we have conclusively 
/proven/ that ID is the correct theory..." At which point, I have two 
major objections:

1. You just spent two chapters utterly failing to convince me that 
evolution is false. You haven't /proven/ it false, you've just whinged 
that "X cannot evolve" (i.e., "I cannot imagine how X could evolve", 
which follows directly from "I don't want it to be possible for X to 
evolve").

2. Even if I accept that evolution is false, this does not prove that ID 
is therefore true. DOES. NOT. FOLLOW.

It defies belief that the author was genuinely unaware of objection #2. 
So what we are looking at here is willful deception of the less 
attentive reader. Such a thing disgusts me.



When Behe stops talking nonesense about how evolution is "impossible" 
and sticks to objective facts (like how rhodopsin works), things get 
much better.

The weighty tome tells us that propeins are amino acid polymers, each 
molecule weighting a few thousand Daltons, and that under physiological 
conditions molecular degradation is thermodynamically unfavourable, 
and... Behe, on the other hand, tells us that proteins are the cogs, 
gears, wheels, pullies, scaffolding and building materials of the 
cellular world.

A protein is a chemical. Usually you don't think much about individual 
chemical molecules. You think of a whole glass of the chemical as one 
essentially continuous entity. Much like a note from a piano is made of 
many individual waves, but you think of it as a continuous thing. But 
when you start thinking of molecules not as abstract things but as 
physical objects that can bend, stretch, pull, push and so forth, and 
you realise that enzymes work by grabbing molecules and slotting them 
together the right way around... suddenly molecular biology makes far 
more sense.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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