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.
Very good. Some points either way might be argued, but a fairly cohesive argument wrapped in an excellent presentation.
strawman.
id says whether or not we know how it happened, we know what design is and it does not arise from disorder.
why do you believe id has anything to do with God?? id can have panspermiasts or worse..
There they go confuting physical and material! Causality is a relation in time. Time as a dimension cannot be considered separately from the other dimensions, the manifold applies in totality or not at all. Non-locality doesn't deny causality. Are the physical laws material? No, but they are real. Is there a cause to physical laws? Yes, we are the cause.
Design! No need for "intelligence" for the very word "design" implies intelligence. By working within a meta-science, philosophical, framing science is liberated, free to become once again vibrant and shining.
I didn't write that 'all' of them do, I wrote that 'many' of them do.
But, once again, by falsely representing what I wrote, you have earned your place among the 'many'. I've seldom encountered anyone who has such difficulties with the plain and simple truth as you.
Even more so, it makes sense to you to attack and impugn all Christians, especially ones who are concerned about how origins of man are taught to little kids.
Just adding this additional quote to emphasize your mendacity.
That is the question I bet you can relate to RWP. I bet you'll never guess how I answered it. I bet you don't even care.
Not really, except that given your record, the answer was unlikely to be truthful.
Excellent insights, xzins! I'm not sure I agree, however, with the above italics. My disagreement stems from my skepticism that an "organizing principle" is something that could have arisen from purely natural (physical in the causally-closed hypothesis), random causes within 3+1D spacetime. If an organizing principle was loaded into the initial conditions of the universe and effectuated by the Big Bang (the "before" of which is something unknown and perhaps utterly incomprehensible, but in which we suspect that no matter or energy existed, or even the physical laws as far as we can tell), then it is something that is prior to universal evolution, and "outside" of it. That is to say, my suspicion that the reason ID is so detested in certain scientific circles is precisely because it is recognized that it asserts a non-physical cause -- which violates the "causally-closed hypothesis" on its face.
Let's hope you're not a prosecution lawyer.
And excludes itself and thereby includes itself.
its worse than i thought..the article's dna and protein conclusions assume ONLY heredity causes 2 organisms to have similar ubiquitous sequences..
don't they observe themselves when they DESIGN a protein to be identical to another protein?? i know they haven't observed themselves making cells yet except in their own fantasies.
please don't dismiss this as simplistic..even if only heredity can copy a sequence, only design can initiate the sequence, which they still have no answer for.
Excellent argument overall. I'll concede my training is not as great as others around here, but I'll take a stab at a couple of things.
First, you have no references included. For example, the speed of light decay situation. That item alone has vast consequences if it turns out to be fully accepted by 'science'.
Also: "It is well known that no pseudorandom generator can produce a wholly orderless output, so order must also be theoretically recapturable from even the outputs of the more complex generators of lifeforms."
I didn't know this. A reference or basic FAQs link about random generators would be good.
AG provides a lot of info theory stuff here, and a good bit of your post dovetails around that subject. I would add cross links between the two.
Philosphically, you make great points, and indeed the worship by scientists is a real event. But, I would argue this: they worship themselves, specifically their 'creativity'.
All in all, a great article.
They assume no such thing. In comparing the sequences of hundreds of organisms, they observe the sequences have a tree-like strcuture, such that two organisms which share a common ancestor have sequences that appear to have diverged from a common ancestor.
If it were design, why do whales and birds have more similar sequences than whales and whale-sharks?
"Therefore, we suspect both constituents of the physical world [i.e., initial/boundary conditions and the physical laws themselves] are actually open towards non-physical causes. In this case, we should ask the telling question: Is the causal structure of the actual world exclusively physical or not?"
What a great question.
Time is the matrix in which the universe and everything in it develops and evolves. But time itself is neither physical nor material. I agree that time as a dimension cannot be separated from the other dimensions, which refer to space. (I have even considered whether space and time may be "Lorentz transformable" in some fashion. But the jury's still out on that one.) The space-time continuum obviously seems to constitute a universal manifold which, by definition, applies as one single totality to the furthest reaches of our (expanding) universe. Non-locality does not necessarily violate causality, for it can be accounted for by, say, the existence of a fifth ("timelike") dimension, which, as Alamo-Girl has pointed out, would view the entire space-time block as a plane, and not a linear progession in time. Or by some other explanation yet unknown to me.
RightWhale, to say that the physical laws are not material, but that they are "real" all the same, is precisely to beg the question: What we are looking for is evidences of things that are real but non-material and non-physical. And it seems that the physical laws fit the description. To say that "we" are the "cause" of the physical laws strikes me as being a theological statement; i.e., one which is incapable of falsification on its face. :^) But whether "we" are the "cause" of the physical laws or not, either way they would still be non-physical and non-material. Or so it seems to me.
Thanks so much for writing, RW!
I thought so, too, gobucks! It seems to be the "$60,000 question" these days....
Thyanks for writing!
One possibility could be some version of what was suggested (and rejected) by Behe in the op-ed:
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.
Another is the "seeding" idea of either Hoyle or assistant, whose name I forget. The idea was that this earth shows intelligent design because life was seeded here by life that began elsewhere. That doesn't solve the discussion, and simply removes it to another area of the universe, the location of which we don't know, but it could also be an area where the life issue could be answered because that would be the location where life originally came about.
Another thought....what if the necessary evidence requires better access to a dimension that we have little access to at this point.
I don't follow you here, RightWhale. Not because i refuse to keep you company (I do enjoy your company!), but because I haven't got a clue what you mean. :^) Are we doing set theory here?
Want to tackle that for me one more time?
As I read through all these EV/ID threads, one thought keeps itself at the forefront of my mind: I took the read pill.
I enter into the "real world" every time I get on my knees...
This debate can be a fun diversion however. Then again, I STILL cannot prove that 32.4 medium sized angels can dance on the head of a normal pin.
Er, precisely because it is the New York Times. Presumably Behe accurately pegged them as the sort of incompetent journalists who would find his twaddle worthy of publication.
From your Platonic viewpoint, I understand what you are saying. But from the Aristotelean viewpoint, the behavior of things is inherent in their natures, and they can't help behaving as such things always do. If you find something "out there," external to the material world, which is responsible for such behavior, then you will have undone Aristotle. A worthy goal, but (I suggest) one that is going to be difficult to achieve.
And ... anyone? Nope. Strike 3.
Looks like it is going to be a long time before I find the 'GOP Evolutionists for Bush' website which describes how traditional Christians' adherence to creationism is so bad for the GOP. Looks like this band of ToE brothers is the only outpost of 'reason' about how the GOP needs to be saved.
Not really, except that given your record, the answer was unlikely to be truthful.
"Except"? Now you are revealing your concern that bible lessons are taught truthfully! Good for you. Like I said, there is hope for you.
(By the way, I told them it was likely Eve had a belly button, though common sense would dictate otherwise. What was definitely interesting to me was that in the ensuing discussion, not one person observed that Adam too had a belly button problem.).
The liar in your life, whoever it was ... you need to forgive him RWP. For if you insist on looking for liars everywhere as a result of that betrayal, to validate your belief system, all you'll ever do is spend your life around .... liars.
And you know the old saying about the company you keep...
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