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.
Appreciate it.
I would suspect that most freepers as well as the founder would disagree with you, as would the vast majority of registered Republicans and people in the conservative movement. Exteremist libertarians who want to eliminate all government regulation are a tiny minority, even on the right.
That being said, most freepers, Republicans, and conservatives (along with me) would agree that the amount of regulation ought to be a lot smaller than it is now.
From an evolutionary perspective, you'd also be wise to consider why no society has ever evolved where the level of government regualtion was zero.
:-}. You've got the victim thing down pretty good. Congrats.
Not overwhelmingly, no. The majority of them voted for Kerry.
I know a lot of people who won't vote for Bush, not because they're not fundamentally conservative, but because they're put off by the bogus religiosity of so many people who claim they're conservatives. You know, gobucks, people who go to Church every Sunday, and lie cheat and steal the other six days of the week? The phrase 'whited sephulcres' comes to mind.
Let's see; we have a theory of origins based on a couple who had three sons, one of which killed his brother, and they populated the earth despite the absence of any other women except their mother, with a bloodline incorporating various other incestuous relationships and internecine homicides; and you're complaining evolution is amoral?
That was one marvelous post, and was well worth repeating.
For any Lurkers interested in a definition of "matter": post 2039 of the hysterical thread
Well, it ain't my field, but I wasn't aware of it. Of course, I should have been. Thanks for the pointer.
Well, gawsh, I guess that means at least one part of the flagellar system has an evolutionary precursor. So much for irreducibility.
The mousetrap is gone, the flagellum is gone, the blood clotting system is gone, has Behe got anything left?
Indeed, I tend to use a lot of techno-jargon in my posts to discuss things which aren't all that complex but the lingo makes it sound that way. And yes, I do love to discuss the mathematics of complexity, information, randomness and especially geometric physics - all of which are relevant to evolution theory.
I will try harder to be communicative.
My point has nothing to with with the historical fact of evolution. I was speaking to the mechanism of natural selection, which is isomorphic to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.
I find it amusing that conservatives believe the marketplace is better than economic planning at producing wealth, but can't see the same process at work in biology. Ethics and morality may require us to provide safety nets for the unfortunate, but the wealth that pays for the safety net is created by stochastic processes for generating product variation, and the unregulated and unpredictable choices of the marketplace for selecting the survivors.
It makes no difference that businesses are run "intelligently" or products are "designed." Their survival is determined by the market, not by the intelligence behind their design. Planned economies always underperform Darwinian economies.
Actually that should be Bergman, not Morris.
I don't know for sure but judging by this statement I would say that you've never run a business.
Any takers for the designated-hitter rule?
This is one of the things that creationists and IDers simply cannot see. "Matter" takes on entirely new characteristics at higher levels of organisation, and must be analyzed at these higher levels.
Evolutionists are accused of reductionism, but it is the creationists that incompetenty attempt to reduce biology to physics. The laws of physics are not broken by living things, but the laws of physics are not adequate or appropriate for the analysis of evolution.
I's not new. I've been bringing it up recently, but I've been here long enough to know what's coming up next. The creationists will soon bring up social darwinism and eugenics, genuine evils.
I am comparing darwinism and the marketplace, not to make a moral point, but to demonstrate that natural selection combined with stochastic variation can produce new, emergent things.
From a moral and ethical point of view, we need to be aware that "progress" is not implied by the process.
Most businesses fail. Even successful businesses eventually stagnate and undergo restructuring. The corporate name may survive, but the management, and often the ownership changes. From a purely objective point of view you cannot anticipate all market changes.
The ability of the marketplace to force corporate restructuring is one of several reasons capitalism is more efficient than socialism.
You beat them to it.
Curiously, the robber-baron form of capitalism produced some of the great fortunes that have persisted, and even grown, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. And even after the heyday of robber-baronism (as it were), Joseph Kennedy and his ilk still knew how to grift with the best of the old-timers, and the Kennedy's, now "old money", continue to live high on the descendant fruits of ill-gotten gains.
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