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.
This isn't a heavy-duty science article, but the graphics are good. Learnung causes changes in the brain that can be seen.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/medicine/1280976.html
Not really, no.
But you yourself seem to have somewhat more of a prejudice than you first admitted.
I did no such thing. I said the DNA sequences were found experimentally to be consistent with a common ancestor.
Hee hee. That would change the complexity of the game. Sort of a reverse suicide squeeze... But what would the Moneyball boys do? Bill James, call your office...
Bwahaha! You're no better at guessing than at telling the truth. Wrong twice.
don't you feel bad instead for ALL kids who go to sunday school and learn about Jesus
Depends. If they get Biblical literalism and the subservience of women in the style of the Southern Baptists, yes I do feel sorry for them. If they're told merely to love their neighbor as themselves, and not to lie cheat and steal, no, I think that's fine. Kids all need ethical instruction.
I can't wait to see how compelling the rationalisms are for honesty from someone who openly rejects the teachings of Christ and openly proclaims himself a priest of reason.
Try Kant's first categorical imperative. In many ways, it's stricter than the ten commandments.
abstract placemarker
I don't vouch for every article, but it's a start.
But most of what we know about the brain prior to the age of MRI scans is known from clinical studies of brain injured patients. The more we know the more likely it is that the mind is the behavior of the brain. It's a general rule of science that the explanation that does not require supernatural components is the one you go with until it fails.
..then you didn't acknowledge your mistake in saying the article didn't premise what it did..nor your apparent false implication with the whale question that design requires certain similarity against observation..
..then you denied assuming common descent when either you or the observers did..yep
you said: 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. you changed it to: I said the DNA sequences were found experimentally to be consistent with a common ancestor.
its ok professor, we care, you can still tactically retreat by rephrasing again and admitting design is a mechanism all along and that's consistent with your theory..
LOL, Betty!!! I guarantee that nothing but internet parchment will claim that.
...hence the importance of peer review.
...which leads directly to the controversy over that dude at the Smithsonian and his article on intelligent design.
(Stirring the pot, in a futile attempt to avoid boredom).
Cheers!
Full Disclosure: Sorry for the late post, I was camping "up North" and no internet...which partially accounts for my boredom. :-)
Recall Ms. Clinton's explanation for her first name re: a certain mountain climber (clymer?) :-)
Cheers!
Good post. Attempts by authoritarian entities of many sorts—churches and governments, in particular—to force scientific research to run down pre-determined paths towards pre-determined goals have always failed. This attempt, too, will fail, as you say.
There's an interesting train of thought along these lines if you try reading The Wisdom of Crowds
Oh, BTW, it also provides a pretty good explanation of why Free Republic & the "blogosphere" [trite cliche BARF alert!] tend to beat the pants off of the MSM--witness the Memogate scandal. Many loosely coupled independent sources, continually revising & comparing--as opposed to authoritarian.
Any other analogies are left to the interested reader.
Cheers!
I think it'd make for a more exciting game - MUCH more exciting than some hormonally enhanced Incredible Hulk getting an 80 home run season.
Now the learning came first. Then the increased interconnectivity between neurons appeared.
On the Bruce Lipton front, and my copy of his new book has not yet arrived nor even shipped, the presence of a nervous system does not ennable learning. Count Korybski also noted this. The creatures of the plant kingdom also learn and can be trained. They are slow, granted. Pond water cell creatures also have behavior, but do they have nervous systems?
Point is, learning does not presuppose any nervous system development at all. It is not even known if memory resides in the brain. But, when something is learned in the animal with a nervous system and brain, neurons hook up. Cause -- effect. Not a major application of the idea.
As I have noted earlier, strawmen don't last long in flame wars :-)
OTOH, surfing these threads, and listening to people saying "natural selection did this" or "evolution did that" without providing (even putative) mechanisms, may tend to invite the creation (no pun, sorry) of strawmen--to fill in the gaps (sorry, just can't help myself!) Yes, I know about PatrickHenry's links, but I bet it's daunting to some laypeople.
Maybe he could deliberately mutate some of their URL addresses so they no longer pointed anywhere--and he could then point to the addresses as contemporary examples of "missing links".
I think I'll quit now before I get banned or zotted for bad puns.
Cheers!
I think what they *meant* was that without the love of God they might not have been driven to explore nature.
Your mileage may vary, for a number of reasons--please recall that intellectual pride, curiosity, phobia, etc. also motivate people.
Oh, yes, there is a great deal more money and time being thrown at science nowadays than there was in the 1400's to 1600's : and indeed, we have the advantage (lacking to the scientific pioneers) that we take the concept and practice of empiricism for granted (no pun on grant money...)
Cheers!
You're saying that crystals are designed???
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