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

Ian Musgrave does a wonderful job explaining the recent Science paper on the evolution of hormone binding sites.
The middle-aged man named
The ACLU-PA blog has an interesting post on a key point in the cross examination of Michael Behe in the Dover trial.
Over at Darwinian Conservatism, Larry Arnhart recently wrote a post about how Michael Behe, the scientific "star" of the ID movement, seems to have fallen out of favor with the Disco Institu

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.