The Darwinists will attempt to raise any and every question, including religion and politics, to avoid systematically addressing that.”

Well said. This is exactly why the greatest obstacle to a sound scientific understanding of neo-Darwinistic processes is Darwinists. To understand the reality accurately, one must be willing to let go of the mythology.

The big problem for Darwinism is not only its observed pace, but also its observed jumping ability. To use Behe’s analogy, if the stairs in a stairwell ascend with regularity and only small steps, all may be well. But if there are discontinuities, such as a large empty space between a lower stair and a higher one (e.g. functionless or dysfunctional gaps separating islands of distinct functionality), then those processes may not have the jumping ability to traverse the gap.

In such a scenario, natural selection/preservation would work to eliminate departures from the local island of functionality. No amount of pace can help if there are discontinuities too large to traverse effectively.

One way for the bookstores to put an end to this nonsense is to put The Edge of Evolution in the best-seller sections.

Sleazy PZ Myers of course heartily approves of this misshelving — he says, “I thought we all did this. You mean most people don’t?” Several commenters on his blog — including a bookstore employee — brag or boast that they have done this misshelving themselves. They also misshelve books in libraries.

The greedy Darwinists are not satisfied with their little “victory” of getting “Of Pandas and People “removed” from Dover classrooms (of course, as we know, the book wasn’t really “banned,” because Wickedpedia refused to put it in the “banned book” list).

I guess truth has nothing to fear from error but error has everything to fear from being exposed a such.

Funny how the Darwinists do the most convincing explanations of people seeking to keep error from being exposed by truth.

That must just be a coincidence.

The Edge is the the amount of complexity that can ascribed to Darwinian or other natural processes which is essentially mutations/rearrangements of the genome and then selection or drift to fix these mutations/rearrangements. Behe has a chart in the beginning and then on page 218 that represents the amount of fine tuning that is necessary to achieve various levels of complexity.

On this hierarchy of fine tuning he locates what could possibly happen by natural processes. He then has a grey area that may or may not be achievable by natural processes and this grey area is the “edge” of where naturalistic processes might be able to produce change but they can go no further. He locates this grey area in the taxonomic hierarchy or genera, family and orders. Classes, cell types, phyla and more complex elements are above this edge and out of reach of naturalistic processes while species, varieties are below it and most likely within reach of naturalistic processes.

He is essentially saying this is what we can expect from naturalistic processes and no more. He has drawn a line in the sand and said there is no evidence that nature can cross it. So the “edge” is a location on the hierarchy of complexity.

Nope. It doesn’t rely on anything but empirical tests. The theoretical work was done in DBB, now this actually studies what happens in the real world, with millions of organisms, and lo and behold, the results match the theory.

This is why it is so damaging (frightening?) to Darwinists. You can’t argue against empirical results the way you can against theory.

Anyway, I like the approach; does it rely on Dembski’s UPB?