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On working biochemists

By jlynch on November 22, 2008.

O'Leary: "Behe is a working biochemist"

Me: "Funny definition of working you're using there, Denyse"

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Intelligent Design

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My favorite quotation from that particular bit of O'Leary word salad is this:

...the Darwin cult's howls of outrage against [Behe's] Edge [of Evolution] are the best evidence that he is on to something and that his work should be seriously considered at such a conference.

Yup. When genuine scientists tell you you're wrong about science that's strong evidence that you're right. Sure thing.

Behe is working in that he's a tenured faculty member at Lehigh, so I won't begrudge him the title of working biochemist. As for praising his publication record, that's another matter entirely. Scanning PubMed, it's amazing that someone with tenure at a research university has had exactly two research papers in the last ten years: the admittedly-not-ID-but-touted-as-ID-anyway Behe and Snoke paper in Protein Science in 2004, and a legitimate comparative sequence analysis paper in DNA Sequence in 1998. His other "publications" during that period were four brief letters to the editor.

Other than Behe and Scott Minnich, is there anyone in the ID movement on the faculty of a research university or heading a lab group at a company that does basic biology research? Of the two, only Minnich is still publishing - useful research, nothing to do with ID.

Um, okay. So if he's working as a garbage-man and also happens to be a biochemist, then he's a working biochemist?