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.
Both Lewinskis (hetero) and sodomy (homosexual) behaviour are a pretty good way to keep from propogating your genes, too.
Hey! You left out us punsters!
Would PW Bridgman say crystals are designed? Anyone who has read over his experimental notebooks would pause before answering that. He spent an extravagent amount of effort to get them to grow. Not an easy task. The machinery to do so took almost super-human efforts to construct-destroy-reinvent-and-reconstruct.
Yet if you look at a crystal of sawgrade diamond or ruby, or gallium arsenide, etc. -- a simpleton might just say -- "Just like those at the beach. Who cares, nothing big at all. Random junk. Pretty, but junk."
"Behe ... just saw a way to make some money from some rubes." How in God's name would you know this? You're just trashing someone you don't like, with no basis.
And why don't you people stop using smear words like "rubes"? Once again, your conduct in this debate does not reflect well on your side.
Methinks you don't really know enough about the Theory of Evolution to actually comment knowledgeably upon it. Hell, you can't even find the shift key on your keyboard.
Memories are simply specific synaptic pathways between neurons. There is nothing "ethereal" about them; they're simply wiring between brain cells.
When is your Nobel Prize coming out? While computer memories are magentic loops in ferrites or trapped electrons or holes in semiconducters, the mechanism for human memory is less well established. What you suggest is theory, not a demonstrated fact.
29+ arguments for macroevolution??if they were right, one would be sufficient, einstein!!
Evolution is an empirical study. Unlike mathematics, it does not provide proofs which, if understood, cannot be doubted. One proof of a mathematical proposition is sufficient to validate the proposition as a theorem (even so, mathematicians delight in proving theorems in various ways—there are literally hundreds of distinct proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem, for example). On the other hand, one piece of evidence or one evidence-based argument is almost never enough to establish the probable truth of an empirical proposition.
If Professor Theobald's detailed presentation of 29+ evidences for macroevolution strikes you as overkill or misguided, you've simply not understood the nature of empirical science.
Thanks for the Fonzie pic. I knew what 'jumps the shark' meant, but it's still nice to have the reference incorporated in the thread.
Right. Any one thing can have many possible explanations. What gives evolution its explanatory power as a theory is the multiple lines of evidence (morphology, DNA, geology, radiometric dating, continental drift, tree rings, ice cores, ocean cores, etc.) that all converge to support it. Nothing else even approaches evolution's ability to unite the evidence from all these various disciplines.
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.Hey, g_w. You probably noted that in the post of mine from which you drew the above quote, I was returning to a theme that you and I discussed very soon after I joined FR. There's no harm in a little Kierkegaardian repetition, I reckon.There's an interesting train of thought along these lines if you try reading The Wisdom of Crowds
I saw an interview with the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. His book sounds interesting and I'll try to check it out.
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.
Agreed.
P.S. Didn't like my little shroud experiment, eh?
Any particular reason why?
In The Road to Serfdom he showed that there was an essential difference between regulating the process, in the form of enforcing simple, clear rules of contract, etc., and regulating the outcome, as happens in centrally planned societies. Free market societies flourish & evolve, while centrally planned societies turn totalitarian and crush the peoples' lives. This is because The People keep getting in the way of The Plan.
And where would you place todays America?
Repeating yourself after you've been rebutted isn't an argument, guy,
you said: they observe the sequences have a tree-like structure, 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. Let me try to make it simple enough to be understood by someone who seems to have difficulties with basic English grammar and punctuation.
Let's consider two organisms, say humans and spider monkeys. We think those organisms have a common ancestor. That common ancestor came long after the common ancestor of humans and fish.
If we compare the DNA of humans and spider monkeys, we see that, while there are some differences between them, there are much bigger differences between both of them and fish. If we look at other organisms, we find that spider monkey and humans share similarities that are not found in any other groups of animals (except apes and monkeys). Observing those similarities and differences don't require any assumptions. We could find them completely blind - not knowing what organism is what.
If you want a proof, I'll post 10 DNA sequences with no information about which organism is which. We'll then ask one of biologists on FR - there are several - to construct a tree. I will then identify the organisms. I guarantee the DNA sequences, with no assumptions whatsoever, and no other information, will allow the biologist reconstruct the evolutionary tree.
Plato and Aristotle weren't working the same problems...
betty, you've forced me to quote Alfred North Whitehead:
"Aristotle dissected fishes with Plato's thoughts in his head."
The quote's from Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, but, since I don't have the book handy just now, I can't be more specific than that.
"Theory" as in scientific theory? Or "theory" as in the creationist definition of the word?
No problem!
No, he wouldn't. A Bridgeman apparatus is merely a way of getting a large single crystal. if you took the same material and did X-ray powder diffraction on it, you'd find the small crystals had the same structure as the large one.
And don't exaggerate. A Bridgeman apparatus is elegant, but not complicated. I've seen a college undergraduate build one.
Theory as in theory. Fact as in fact. How's that Nobel coming?
I'm not exaggerating, which you would know if you had studied any of his work.
And there is a considerable difference between a large single crystal -- which is what people think of when they think "crystal", and a conglomeration of growth faces each only a few atoms thick.
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