Posted on 02/07/2005 8:16:39 AM PST by metacognative
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Design for Living By MICHAEL J. BEHE
Published: February 7, 2005
ethlehem, Pa. — 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. As one of the scientists who have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not. Advertisement
First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. For example, a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading. Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.
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. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.
Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as 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. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.
For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, once wrote that biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved. (Imagine a scientist repeating through clenched teeth: "It wasn't really designed. Not really.")
The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined. In the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules. There are little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.
In 1998 an issue of the journal Cell was devoted to molecular machines, with articles like "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines" and "Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks, Springs and Things." Referring to his student days in the 1960's, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that "the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered." In fact, Dr. Alberts remarked, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. He emphasized that the term machine was not some fuzzy analogy; it was meant literally.
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.
Scientists skeptical of Darwinian claims include many who have no truck with ideas of intelligent design, like those who advocate an idea called complexity theory, which envisions life self-organizing in roughly the same way that a hurricane does, and ones who think organisms in some sense can design themselves.
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.
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.
Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore. Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed. And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design.
Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, is the author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
I could talk about cotton, but I'm not the one claiming to be able to tell the different between natural and designed objects. I'm the one saying it can be hard unless you know the history.
That's a fiendishly long time to wait for the next book of the month club selection.
Now if we include some natural selection process, and factor in the cost of feeding the monkeys -- not to mention handling any evoution they might undergo, this becomes intolerably ridiculous. A book that is never read. A cost that is unbearable.
Natural selection implies timing and ripeness. A mutant creature surviving at time A will not survive at Time B some periods later. The mix of selections will change.
The odds for natural selection as the mechanism for making us what we are today are unimaginably long ....
No, they won't be disappointed. They are welcome and encouraged to consider formal methods that might assist in distinguishing those cases where a conscious effort at design is involved, versus a more "hands off" approach. Both are valuable and both serve a purpose. The universe would either be a boring place or an infinitely tiresome place if everything manifested itself as a conscious effort on the part of the Designer.
I wouldn't disagree with that statement at all.
The true confusion is demonstrated in how evolusionists keep moving the goal posts (as we see above) and redefining their theory when they are unable to respond to a strong creationist argument.
And then attempt to compensate for their weak positions by calling people names like "ignorant".
Way too predictable.
Natural selection does not imply a destination. When at point A, there are a nearly infinite number of potential point Bs.
You are engaged in restrospective astonishment, the assumption that point B was destiny.
Exactly. So many so-called intelligent scientists working so hard to design a program that will help them prove that no intelligent design was needed to create life as we know it.
If this doesn't reveal the utter hypocrisy and foolishness of evolutionists I don't know what does.
We have a word for situations where natural selection requires a specified complex adaptation, and the adaptation is not forthcoming.
The word is extinction.
As if that is some kind of fault. Do you think Einstein and other great scientists did not/do not engage in the same? Are you a stone? As it stands, the better course of history in every respect has gone from point A to point B, and continues to do so. What kind of reality would not bring about a certain amount of retrospective astonishment within a normal human being?
But, as you agreed, the probability for anyone sequence is the same as that for any other sequence, and here we are.
Natural selection implies timing and ripeness. What does that mean? By timing that selection and mutation processes occur in synchronity -- a more colorful flower favors a bee with better color vision, a bee with better color vision then restricts his search area and pollen supply to the more colorful flowers and the soil chemisty in that now more local region changes in a more local way, the soil bacteria and fungo adapt, etc, etc. Yet if the bee's cells do not mutate during that time -- one season, and only the bloom, time of that season -- a few DAYS -- while the flower is more colorful, all of that does not happen.
The few days the mutant flower is in bloom's color is the ripe time for a mutant bee. If bee grand mommy's egg not struck by cosmic ray and mutant at just the ripe time -- no nail, no shoe, no horse, kingdom lost.
You should be able to follow that, even though my metaphor got struck by a ray cosmic and mutated.
A priori probability. Yes that is so. Post priori, no way. We here are. Therefore and ipso facto -- post priori.
It is interesting how the "tracks" of the creationists' websites make it here via your posts.
Random process. Really.
Neither Behe nor Dembski make any such distinction. How would you distinguish between a lazy, hands-off designer and no designer at all? Or do we simply assume design everywhere and then rationalize our assumption however we see fit?
Diseases may be unpleasant in the natural world, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. He is not of this world, and His ways are not our ways. It is hubris to claim to know that a designer would not purposely create flaws.
Natural selection implies timing and ripeness. A mutant creature surviving at time A will not survive at Time B some periods later. The mix of selections will change.
Natural selection is always working, pruning invididuals and species. It doesn't rest, it doesn't think, it doesn't foresee, it doesn't worry. If a mutation confers an adaptive advantage, the mutation survives and replicates itself in some subset of a population; if not, it doesn't. End of story.
It's estimated that there are currently between 3 million and 50 million species of biological organisms on Earth. The recently deceased Ernst Mayr has estimated that since the beginning of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago, as many as 1 billion species have come and gone. If species A can't hack it, species B will take its niche. The species that exist currently are the result of ruthless pruning by natural selection and, more recently, by anthropogenic selection.
Unfortunately, evolutionists have created a system of devolution.
When Creationists are intelligent and actually try to understand evolutionary logic, they have to face the unpleasant facts.
But when Creationists come out with a "strong Creationist argument" (translation: they are rude and willfully stupid, and change the subject of the argument whenever evolutionists explain their position), evolutionists get annoyed and can't come up with a useful response (because how do you respond to willful stupidity?). So the stupid, ignorant Creationists come out of the exchange feeling good, like they got the upper hand.
Since this behavior is reinforced every time they have an interaction with evolutionists, they devolve until they completely shun logic. The less logic they use, the happier they are, the better they feel after the exchange. "Boy we shure took a dump on that Evo thread, huh Cletus?" (do you think this could be accurate, PatrickHenry?)
Now back to the point at hand. The goalposts have not been moved.
I take it you are a fan of Dr. Behe? He wrote a whole book about "irreducible complexity." In fact, that's the friggin' point of this thread. (no, really, read the article at the top of the thread; it's by him, about irreducible complexity with regard to the evolution of species; it has nothing to do with the very first cell). Many Creationists claim it is impossible to evolve irreducible complexity. It's a common creationist argument.
And evolutionists have shown that it's a crock. They've done so in logical "thought experiments" and in simulated evolution in computer games. They've done so by pointing to existing examples of irreducible complexity that could quite possibly have evolved (the flytrap example and the PCP-eating bacteria example).
Once it's been shown that IC is a crock, instead of admitting this, the creationists run off to some other topic, like how the first self-replicating cell got here. That's a different discussion for a different time, unrelated to whether or not life as it exists today (IC and all) could have evolved from that single cell.
You don't want to admit that Irreducible Complexity is not a valid argument against macroevolution, so you change the subject and throw in a few insults at people who believe in evolution so maybe we won't notice what you're doing. It doesn't work.
I never said it didn't happen, I said it is not science, it is theology.
Science is a limited discipline and properly functions only in studying how the world works when God does not intervene.
Once you let miraculous intervention into a scientific discipline, it corrupts it completely for there is no rational point at which you can then say "This is an unknown process we need to examine" and not have another say, "no, God did it miraculously, so there is nothing to study".
So9
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