Michael Behe’s Book-Length Emily Litella Moment

Actress Gilda Radner developed a character named “Emily Litella” on Saturday Night Live during the 1970s. Litella would be featured as responding to some news item reported in SNL’s weekend update segment, delivering a fulminating and completely sincere rant. But in each case, the rant would be premised upon some misunderstanding of the news item in question, as when Litella went on and on decrying the notion of “eagle rights” when the “equal rights amendment” was in the news. Given the information that she had her facts wrong, Litella would face the camera and give her signature signoff: “Never mind.”

Nick Matzke has a post up at PT that takes up Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.

Behe is still banging on about “irreducible complexity” and he concentrates there upon a new “example”, that of the cilium of the metazoan malarial parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. The Plasmodium ciliary apparatus is “irreducibly complex”, Behe assures us, and it’s even more “irreducibly complex” because it, like other ciliary examples, has as a subsystem another “irreducibly complex” thing, the IFT or intraflagellar transport system. Except that, as Matzke points out in his post, the Plasmodium cilia does not use the IFT. It, in fact, demonstrates “reducible complexity” by utilizing intracellular construction of the cilium. Matzke also goes on to show that the information that could have given Behe a clue was quite prominently incorporated in the scientific literature. Here’s Nick’s summation:

[…] This gets me back to my original point: a great deal of creationism/ID boils down to sloppy claims made on insufficient information, plus wishful thinking that blocks the impulse to double-check one’s claims against previous research. Once you become alerted to this feature of ID you will see it everywhere.

Oh, I almost forgot the best part: Which apicomplexan critter is it that builds cilia despite Behe’s declaration that “a functioning cilium requires a working IFT”? Why, it’s Plasmodium falciparum, aka malaria, aka Behe’s own biggest running example used throughout The Edge of Evolution. Yes, it’s the very critter about which Behe wrote on page 237,

“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.”

But not, apparently, the parts which Behe thought were required for cilium construction. If there is an Intelligent Designer up there, I suspect He’s having a bit of a chuckle right now.

There is one difference between Radner’s Litella and IDC advocates having Litella moments; while Litella had enough sense to recognize when she was wrong, you just never seem to hear the “Never mind” from the IDC advocates.