Re: CT article: Darwinists, not Christians, stonewalling the facts

This was the most surprising aspect of the article to me:

> Behe's thesis faced a challenge from the nation's leading expert on
> cell
> structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California-San
> Diego. Doolittle cited a study on bloodletting in the journal Cell that
> supposedly disproved Behe's argument. Behe immediately read the
> article-and found that the study proved just the opposite: It supported
> his theory. Behe confronted Doolittle, who privately acknowledged that
> he was wrong-but declined to make a public retraction.
>

However, Colson has made this accusation before and Doolittle has responded
to it:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000884.html

The website, i, in part, reads:
  
Writing in a church magazine,
http://www.floridabaptistwitness.com/3746.article Charles Colson had this to
say…
Soon after the book was published, its thesis was challenged by the leading
expert in America on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University
of California. He cited a scientific study supposedly disproving irreducible
complexity. Behe immediately researched it and found it proved just the
opposite: It confirmed him. So Behe went back to Dolittle. In a phone
conversation, Doolittle admitted he was wrong, but he has never made a
public retraction.
Is this story true? Far from it. Mark Perakh emailed Dr. Doolittle, who
generously allowed his reply to be quoted.
Doolttle wrote:
Thanks for sending me the latest on the desperate tactics that these people
avail themselves of. Others have written me in the past about my alleged
“concession.” What happened is that Behe emailed me after my article
appeared and challenged my tail-end assertion about the Bugge et al paper. I
went back and read it more carefully, and indeed, I had overstated one
aspect. It was inadvertant, and I apologized. Ah, rue the day with minds
like theirs!
In my paper I raised the point of how mice without plasminogen were severely
ill. Mice without fibrinogen are also unwell, although not as badly off as
the plasminogen-lackers. However, the big point was that mice lacking both
genes were considerably better off than the ones that only lacked
plasminogen. I had said these mice were “..for all practical
purposes..normal,” although I went on to qualify the statement about how the
mice would doubtless be compromised in the wild. In fact, the paper makes it
clear that the mice are not “normal” in that they don’t breed well, even
though the individuals are not unwell. My original point, lost in all the
persiflage, was that there is a “point and counterpoint” in the evolution of
these two genes, as there is in the evolution of many interacting systems.
It’s truely annoying that the creationists (“Intelligent Designers”) get so
much much mileage out these side-issues and refuse to confront the main
message.
Regards,
Russell Doolittle
Received on Mon Mar 28 17:34:14 2005