Posted on 02/12/2005 4:24:09 PM PST by snarks_when_bored
Nick Matzke has also commented on this, but the op-ed is so bad I can't resist piling on. From the very first sentence, Michael Behe's op-ed in today's NY Times is an exercise in unwarranted hubris.
In the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design.
And it's all downhill from there.
Intelligent Design creationism is not a "rival theory." It is an ad hoc pile of mush, and once again we catch a creationist using the term "theory" as if it means "wild-ass guess." I think a theory is an idea that integrates and explains a large body of observation, and is well supported by the evidence, not a random idea about untestable mechanisms which have not been seen. I suspect Behe knows this, too, and what he is doing is a conscious bait-and-switch. See here, where he asserts that there is evidence for ID:
Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims.
This is where he first pulls the rug over the reader's eyes. He claims the Intelligent Design guess is based on physical evidence, and that he has four lines of argument; you'd expect him to then succinctly list the evidence, as was done in the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ on the talkorigins site. He doesn't. Not once in the entire op-ed does he give a single piece of this "physical evidence." Instead, we get four bald assertions, every one false.
The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature.
He then tells us that Mt Rushmore is designed, and the Rocky Mountains aren't. How is this an argument for anything? Nobody is denying that human beings design things, and that Mt Rushmore was carved with intelligent planning. Saying that Rushmore was designed does not help us resolve whether the frond of a fern is designed.
Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too.
No, this is controversial, in the sense that Behe is claiming it while most biologists are denying it. Again, he does not present any evidence to back up his contention, but instead invokes two words: "Paley" and "machine."
The Reverend Paley, of course, is long dead and his argument equally deceased, thoroughly scuttled. I will give Behe credit that he only wants to turn the clock of science back to about 1850, rather than 1350, as his fellow creationists at the Discovery Institute seem to desire, but resurrecting Paley won't help him.
The rest of his argument consists of citing a number of instances of biologists using the word "machine" to refer to the workings of a cell. This is ludicrous; he's playing a game with words, assuming that everyone will automatically link the word "machine" to "design." But of course, Crick and Alberts and the other scientists who compared the mechanism of the cell to an intricate machine were making no presumption of design.
There is another sneaky bit of dishonesty here; Behe is trying to use the good names of Crick and Alberts to endorse his crackpot theory, when the creationists know full well that Crick did not believe in ID, and that Alberts has been vocal in his opposition.
So far, Behe's argument has been that "it's obvious!", accompanied by a little sleight of hand. It doesn't get any better.
The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.
Oh, so many creationists tropes in such a short paragraph.
Remember, this is supposed to be an outline of the evidence for Intelligent Design creationism. Declaring that evolutionary biology is "no good" is not evidence for his pet guess.
Similarly, declaring that some small minority of scientists, most of whom seem to be employed by creationist organizations like the Discovery Institute or the Creation Research Society or Answers in Genesis, does not make their ideas correct. Some small minority of historians also believe the Holocaust never happened; does that validate their denial? There are also people who call themselves physicists and engineers who promote perpetual motion machines. Credible historians, physicists, and engineers repudiate all of these people, just as credible biologists repudiate the fringe elements that babble about intelligent design.
The last bit of his claim is simply Behe's standard misrepresentation. For years, he's been going around telling people that he has analyzed the content of the Journal of Molecular Evolution and that they have never published anything on "detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures", and that the textbooks similarly lack any credible evidence for such processes. Both claims are false. A list of research studies that show exactly what he claims doesn't exist is easily found.
The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.
How does Behe get away with this?
How does this crap get published in the NY Times?
Look at what he is doing: he is simply declaring that there is no convincing explanation in biology that doesn't require intelligent design, therefore Intelligent Design creationism is true. But thousands of biologists think the large body of evidence in the scientific literature is convincing! Behe doesn't get to just wave his hands and have all the evidence for evolutionary biology magically disappear; he is trusting that his audience, lacking any knowledge of biology, will simply believe him.
After this resoundingly vacant series of non-explanations, Behe tops it all off with a cliche.
The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.
Behe began this op-ed by telling us that he was going to give us the contemporary argument for Intelligent Design creationism, consisting of four linked claims. Here's a shorter Behe for you:
The evidence for Intelligent Design.
That's it.
That's pathetic.
And it's in the New York Times? Journalism has fallen on very hard times.
This article was first published on Pharyngula and appears here by permission.
IMHO, both Plato and Aristotle were looking at the same subject but from different aspects.
I perceive this same kind of difference among Christian doctrines/churches and have used a diamond as a metaphor to explain it. IOW, we are all looking at the same diamond and the same Light - but will see things differently according to the facet we are looking through. Thus there is a split between Calvinists, Arminians, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, etc.
Likewise with Plato and Aristotle, they were both looking at the same thing but disagreed on which aspect was the correct one. Max Tegmark used the frog/bird metaphor to explain the difference. In Tegmark's phrasing, the Aristotle view is that of the frog whereas the Plato view is that of the bird.
Honestly, I would $57 dollars US for ONE DVD containing your viewable-as-a-movie memories as recorded from a MRI machine or other such physically sensing instrument of your neuron synapses. No John Kerry-ish 8mm home videos allowed. Actual understandable movies derived from sensing of your neurons firing.
My memories aren't all that exciting. My fantasies, on the other hand ...
And where would you place todays America?
Both of you, try reading Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State!
The book was written before the Russian revolution, and correctly predicts that the collision of capitalism and communism will lead to a state in which some are compelled to work primarily for the good of others--(can you say Social Security?)--and is a fun read anyway, even if it goes slowly.
Cheers!
OK, but where's your time machine to go back 200 million years ago to make sure your tree is correct in all cases? Where's the "control group" ?
I.e. what if some of the 'true' transitional forms have not been discovered yet? How can you tell?
I think the problem many of the people attacking evolution have, is that we cannot go back in a time machine and double-check the hypotheses empirically.
"And," they think, "since we don't have the mathematical formalism that say, special or general relativity has, and since there have been many surprises along the way, why are the evo's so dang cocksure of things?"
This, coupled with the behaviour of scientists in revising a model, while keeping the essential elements, makes a layperson feel like they are trying to "nail jello to a tree."
I'm willing to bet that a little more patience by the scientists in explaining the underpinnings and processes by which they reach there conclusions, will do a lot more than just "pointing to links" and saying "So THERE!"--because to the layperson, it seems just as much like argument from authority as quoting from the Bible.
Cheers! (PS Thanks to snarks when bored for bringing that useful word 'empirical' into the discussion.)
I see that you've been proved correct once again.
Reading this morning about this guy that (for $3k) will tell you that the promisory note (mortgage) has value and since it has value you don't need to pay your mortgage payments to the loan agency ...
I think RWP's point was that the trees dervied from the unlabeled DNA sequences would match the trees that had previously been derived from other sources. He proposed that test because someone was arguing that the DNA sequences led to the same trees because of implicit assumptions about how life evolved, and that they weren't independent evidence in their own right.
When you think something, and then you do that, how does your thought get converted into action? You think, 'I'm going to send theis post,' and then your finger pushes a switch on the mouse and it's done. How does a thought move the finger?
There’s more ways to falsify the theory than just this but getting correspondents on these threads to discuss them is quite another matter.
How complexity arose in biological systems, for instance is a major area of current research – mostly by mathematicians who actually support evolution theory, i.e. not by intelligent design theorists.
Darwin evidently realized the implications of thermodynamics in his day because he studiously avoided the concepts of higher and lower. (Second Law of Thermodynamics) And today, the most aggressive defenders of the original theory put great stock in the notion that species developed by happenstance of random mutations and natural selection.
But the great mathematicians who have entered the debate see something quite different – many of them in response to the von Neumann challenge (self-organizing complexity or cellular automata). And there is a rising interest in the application of “algorithmic information theory” to origin of species.
The bottom line is that there is not yet a consensus on the subject of how complexity arose in biological systems. But the answer to that question may supplant all notions of happenstance.
Another, related inquiry which stands to falsify the “theory of evolution” as originally formulated is how information [Shannon paraphrased as successful communications] arose in biological systems.
This is a pregnant subject, to say the least, because it involves not only the rise of the message (DNA, RNA) – but the semiosis (encoding and decoding) and autonomy.
And it involves something else which is almost never discussed on these threads: the will to live, the want to live or struggle to survive. All of the organism’s molecular machinery are organized as integrated functions working together for that purpose. And yet we have no plausible explanation why, much less the origin of such purpose.
Even more fundamental than all of these points is that we do not have a consensus agreement on what is life v. non-life or death.
Without that, evolutionists, abiogenesists, biologists and chemists can theorize, quantize continuums and pontificate until the cows come home – and still not have a plausible explanation for what we observe when we climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa and throw a live albatross, a dead albatross and a 12 lb cannonball over the side.
I suppose being able to photograph the change in neural connections befor and after learning doesn't demonstrate it as a fact, but it puts it in first place as a hypothesis.
This is the heart of "information theory and molecular biology".
Information is an action not a message in the Shannon mathematical theory of communication. More specifically, information is the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver or molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state.
Thus, when the will to move a finger arises, successful communications cascade among the various molecular machinery in the organism to accomplish that intent. All such state changes pay the thermodynamic tab by dissipating energy into the local surroundings. (Channel Capacity of Molecular Machines)
For a summary of a discussion on this with links: Plato thread post 491. The discussion leading up to and following the summary includes other details, links, etc.
I can't believe I am seeing FReepers spout New Age Yuppie crap. Next we'll have someone quoting from "Plants Are Like People" and claiming plants learn.
How is a thought, with no mass and no energy, translated to physical motion.
At some point there is information and physical phenomena, but we're not there. We haven't jumped the hurdle. We are still in thought.
You obviously can't directly measure the sequences of long-extinct animals. That doesn't mean you can't deduce what they were.
I.e. what if some of the 'true' transitional forms have not been discovered yet? How can you tell?
I'm sure they haven't. We don't need to know what they were to infer what their DNA base sequenece looked like.
Here's an example. Let's compare the first 20 amino acids of myoglobin from three kinds of whale (I take it you won't object to the idea that whales are related to each other), and a single-member 'outgroup', the horse. This is from a much bigger molecular phylogeny I recently ran with a freshman class. Here are the sequences:
Finback 1 vltdaewhlv lniwakvead Humpback 1 vlsdaewqlv lniwakvead Sperm w. 1 vlsegewqlv lhvwakvead Horse 1 glsdgewqqv lnvwgkveadNow, if we compare the sequences, clearly the differences between finback and humpback are fewer than the differences between finback and sperm, or humpback and sperm. Let's count them up: F-H = 2, F-S = 6, H-S = 4. We therefore adopt as a working hypothesis that the finback and humpback diverged after their common ancestor diverged from the sperm whale. That agrees with morphology, of course, the first two are baleen whales and the sperm whale is a toothed whale, but we're not assuming anything, other than that more similar sequences imply closer ancestry. What was the DNA sequence of the common ancestor? Well, if we adopt the principle of minimum parsimony (which is in essence Occam's razor; we assume the tree resulted from a minimum number of mutations), then the s in position 3 is common to Sperm and Humpback but not to the Finback, and therfore can be best explained by a mutation in the Finback from s to t after it diverged from the Humpback. The same is true for position 8, where it looks like the Finback mutated from q to h. We therefore have as the common ancestor for finback and humpback a sequence identical to the present day humpback's (there are however changes from the humpback further down the protein)
What of the common ancestor of the baleen and toothed whales? Well, the horse and the baleen whales have a d in position 4, changed to an e in the sperm whale, so minimum parsimony says we should put d in the whale common ancestor and say the sperm mutated to e. The horse and sperm have g in position 5, whereas the baleen whales have an a; looks like g mutated to a after the whales diverged from the horse but before the baleen whales diverged from the sperm whale. At position 12, the horse shares n with the baleen whales, but the sperm whale is h; score that as a mutation in the sperm whale line after it diverged from the other whales. Using similar logic we put a v at position 13. Everything else is common.
And so now we have the first 20 amino acids in the myoglobin sequence of a long-extinct animal for which we may not even have a fossil, but which a mathematical analysis of the DNA, combined with Occam's razor, says must have existed.
Ancestral whale 1 vlsdgewqlv lnvwakvead
Now, all of this is limited by the fact we're dealing with a short sequence, only four animals, and a limited number of mutations. If we simultaneously find a minimum parsimony tree for hundreds of sequences in hundreds of organisms, we can get our statistical uncertainty (that we have the right tree) to almost zero. The logic is the same, you just need a computer to run the analysis. (Such programs are downloadable as freeware, BTW, if you want to try it; it's fun.)
That, of course should be 'maximum parsimony', not 'minimum parsimony', which is a phrase best used to describe congresscritters.
I thought we had jumped the hurdle. The above example initiates with willfulness or intent as compared to sensory information such as a bright light shining in your eyes originating the successful communications (information) which make you blink.
There is of course another subconscious will which keeps your heart beating and all the other functions operating (the will to live) but you raised a specific question about moving a finger - an intent.
Now let's see if the usual suspects give the usual complaints.
When someone says the mind is the behavior of the prain, there are certain implications. There is no recording device and no tape. The brain does not store memories. It changes. There is no RAM or ROM, just the behavior of the brain as a whole. No way to record and play back on another device.
It is only a a hypothesis.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.