with friends like these...

Appearing on the stand in the Dover ID trial, Michael Behe turned out to be the star witness--but for the wrong side. First he admitted that astrology would be a science under his tortured definition of "science." Then he demonstrated the substandard academic history of the textbook under fire, Of Pandas and People.

And now, to top it off, he exposed the embarrassing lack of evidence for Irreducible Complexity, his calling card.

Ed Brayton writes:

And remember, the core of Behe's entire argument for ID is that irreducibly complex systems cannot evolve. Yet what does he admit under oath that his own study actually says? It says that IF you assume a population of bacteria on the entire earth that is 7 orders of magnitude less than the number of bacteria in a single ton of soil...and IF you assume that it undergoes only point mutations...and IF you rule out recombination, transposition, insertion/deletion, frame shift mutations and all of the other documented sources of mutation and genetic variation...and IF you assume that none of the intermediate steps would serve any function that might help them be preserved...THEN it would take 20,000 years (or 1/195,000th of the time bacteria have been on the earth) for a new complex trait requiring multiple interacting mutations - the very definition of an irreducibly complex system according to Behe - to develop and be fixed in a population.

Even if ID wins out in Dover, it's lost where it counts, all thanks to a professor named Michael Behe.