Lies, Intellectual Dishonesty, and Intellectual Laziness

Once again it appears that I have told a lie over on Joe G's blog. (I'm not linking to it b/c I don't want to increase his search engine ranking... so there!)

Here is my "lie":

In one paper about mice, we find that mice who are missing certain parts of the blood clotting system have some problems - but the system still functions as a blood clotting system. Remember what Behe said: "the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."

Well, that's not what happens. Although there are problems, the blood clotting system still works for the mice without all the proteins in other systems - it just causes problems for them.

Joe's response?

And another lie:

FG:
In one paper about mice, we find that mice who are missing certain parts of the blood clotting system have some problems - but the system still functions as a blood clotting system.

The system didn't function:

In Defense of the Irreducibility of the Blood Clotting Cascade



I will admit to some level of intellectual laziness. My statements were based on a summary of Doolittle's findings. I didn't actually read his paper, nor did I read the two papers which Behe talks about in his rebuttal. Sorry.

Would you put that on the same level as lying about the number of peer reviewed papers supporting ID? What about refusing to disclose on your website the Christian orientation of your group?

I have since read the two papers by Bugge that Behe references. Let me amend my statement:

Mice without certain aspects of the blood clotting cascade have various health problems. However, they can survive and reproduce even with these deficiencies.

Does that disprove IC?

Who cares?

There is plenty more research on the evolution of the blood clotting system in addition to what Doolittle wrote. Go here for starters.

For example, from another paper by Doolittle:

"The blood coagulation scheme for the puffer fish, Fugu rubripes, has been reconstructed on the basis of orthologs of genes for mammalian blood clotting factors being present in its genome. As expected, clotting follows the same fundamental pattern as has been observed in other vertebrates, even though genes for some clotting factors found in mammals are absent and some others are present in more than one gene copy."

In other words, parts are missing but the function remains. Not IC.

Anyway, when I replied to Joe, he again called me an "absolutely dishonest person" for posting a link to EvoWiki.

Nevermind that the EvoWiki page linked to has links to plenty of peer reviewed papers.

Nevermind that the Doolittle paper I sent also was peer reviewed.

And of course the real howler: It's OK for Joe to post links to ARN and Discovery Institute pages, but it's "absolutely dishonest" for me to link to an EvoWiki page.

I stand corrected.

See what I mean when I called him dense?

Tags:

• intelligentdesign
• thinking