I may not have agreed with or understood it but I have read Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box:The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

I did read "from Pandas to People," however and there is a study in junk science.

The book "finding darwins god" does a good job of picking this one apart. The author is religous but still believes in evolutiuon.

Natester:

Can you make a specific claim that Miller makes that counters Behe and you believe to be true?

I have attended lectures of Behe where he point by point takes on his critics exposing their errors.

Behe can be very persuasive.

I witnessed students walking in with their protest signs, listening carefully to the arguments and then hanging their heads as the reasoning broke through.

It is not fun to have one's balloon popped.

Its been years since I read the book so no, I don't remember specific claims but he cited studies that addressed issues that Behe claimed had never been addressed by science. Both of these people can be persuasive when their primary critics aren't present. They are very well prepared for anything you could write on a sign. I've seen them debate together on TV and Behe did not seem very persuasive at all when in Millers company. I felt that in his book, Behe kept relying on saying that no one could answer his specific questions on how certain things evolved and he used the lack of some one else’s ability to answer his questions as justifications to draw his conclusions. This seems to be a very unscientific approach. Behe argues that certain systems are irreducibly complex, which is true in their modern state, but then he makes the jump that it must be impossible to evolve something that is irreducibly complex. To me this is flawed logic. We, and that includes Behe, don't know how some of these systems evolved to get to their current state so to say its impossible for them to have evolved just because he can't explain how seems arrogant. While scientists can't explain a mechanism of evolution for every cellular function, the possibilities have not been exhausted to the point of concluding divine intervention. I liked Miller's attitude that allowed for evolution and god to coexist without the need for conflict and I felt his book was much more convincing and logical.

Plus, irreducible complexity evolving is fairly trivial to imagine. You develop a new system, you gradually drop things you don't need until it is irreducibly complex. Losing things is much faster than gaining them.

I was warned that rattlesnakes had evolved not to rattle, because the thing that most often kills them now is humans who will hunt them down to kill them to make areas safer. Rather than warning predators away, their rattle was killing them. So, now we have non-rattling rattle snakes.

Losing things is easy. So, you'd expect irreducible complexity to happen over time, since anything unnecessary is less efficient unless it is a backup mechanism that kicks in in case of injury, illness, etc.

Rachel:

Do you have a source about those rattlesnakes?

Hmm, I can't find my earlier source. You can find various sources by searching for "non-rattling rattlesnakes" but most of it is hearsay from people in various regions or snake-loving communities that have to deal with it. I learned about it because I lived in an area where it might be relevant. There are non-rattling breeds of rattlesnake, but I can't find info on how that came about. I just now that just starting recently non-rattling rattlers have been reported and you need ot be careful about them.