Beating on Behe

Behe's latest piece of dreck (The Edge of Evolution) has appeared and it has already recieved quite the beatdown from Michael Ruse, Mark Chu-Carroll, PZ Myers, and Nick Matzke, with Nick's post being fairly damning regarding Behe's "ability" to do basic research (see here as well). I've a copy sitting on my desk here but am not terrible keen to crack it open, particular as there appears to be nothing new in the book beyond what was said eleven years ago in Darwin's Black Box - ID, a "new science for a new century" that is still trapped in the old century, it appears.

Whether I bother to read it or not, I'd like to draw you attention to the following quote by Behe:

"Here's something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts." (p. 237)

Quite. Malaria - which "causes disease in approximately 400 million people every year and kills between one and three million people every year" (source) was intentionally designed. And I guess, so to is AIDS, and Ebola, and so on.

Oh yeah, that's a God Designer worth worshipping. Sign me up.

More like this

You've probably already seen a few reviews of Michael Behe 's new book, The Edge of Evolution. I've barely cracked open my review copy yet, but I already know that one example that features prominently throughout the book is malaria (hence my interest in it, moreso than any more "irreducible…
Let me add a quick addendum to the previous post. People aren't appreciating yet how hard-core a designist Behe actually is; one comment mentions that "apparently God is directly responsible for the creation of drug-resistant malaria." No. The Designer, who must have godlike powers, specifically…
I peeked. I was reading Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, and I was several chapters into it. All he seemed to be saying was that evolution has limits, limits, limits, and those limits are so restrictive that you can't get from there to here, and he was repeating it over and over, in…
Meanwhile, the reviews of Michael Behe's new book The Edge of Evolution are starting to appear. Michael Ruse weighs in with a short review for The Globe and Mail. His verdict: Although I am a hard-line Darwinian evolutionist and loathe and detest IDT, I have a grudging admiration for Darwin's…

Dreck indeed. Your response to the malaria quote is exactly the same as mine.

Now John, you know very well that malaria was designed to test our faith.