Kenneth Miller: Behe has done his sums wrong…

One important point that Miller brings up is that Behe’s book is teetering on a hinge of bad statistics, citing the research on malaria to show that spontaneous resistance to anti-malarial drugs occur in 1 individual in 10^20.

Linking that to the age of the virus, Behe concludes, in his book, that:

“On average, for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would need to wait a hundred million times ten million years. Since that is many times the age of the universe, it’s reasonable to conclude the following: No mutation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

What Miller realized, and what should become obvious upon inspection, is that Behe’s figure, 1 in 10^20, does not represent the probability of the mutation occuring. Miller writes:

“Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation “of the same complexity” occurring in the human line. He hasn’t. What he has actually done is to determine the odds of these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously at precisely the same position in exactly the same gene in a single individual. He then leads his unsuspecting readers to believe that this spurious calculation is a hard and fast statistical barrier to the accumulation of enough variation to drive Darwinian evolution.”

rawfish.com.au