How 'bout some Hot Buttered Soul?
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.
But the thinking is not a neural response. That is perception. The thing that follows perception is intuition. Stay on that physical side of the hurdle if you want, but where does the soul reside?
See RWP's DNA sequencing above. Is that a form of memory? I'd think is form and memory both. And RWP theorizes he can play it back. (I disagree with his "must be" at the end btw, yet in general agree that his resultant inference is a good guess accorded to a pratical theory.)
I disagree with my 'must be' too, BTW; you can get the wrong answer by improbable double mutations, as well a host of more complicated effects. I do claim, though, that by doing this with 15 species of whales, rather than 4, and a bigger outgroup, your playback uncertainty becomes so small you can be pretty darn sure you have the right sequence.
To quote "Weird Al" Yankovic:
I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitos and before long they were cloning DNA... etc. [chorus] Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark all the dinosaurs are running wild etc.
I personally hypothesize that biological evolution and learning are similar processes. In both, what changes is frequency or probability. In both, the change in probability is shaped by consequenses. The physical means and time scale are quite different.
This isn't something I made up, but it is on the back burner, along with other speculations.
:-)
Problem is, you need descendants to make it work. Tyrannosaurus didn't leave any progeny, thank heavens.
In the flesh, we sense the soul is tethered to the body, that there is a correlation, because many of us cannot willfully reach beyond the physical context. But that is a perception only – based on the four dimensional limitation of our vision and our mind.
When the Spirit of God enters a tethered soul, the difference is clear.
Obviously you missed the sequels.
I think that is related to what you speculate.
"gay"-ness is not a matter of evolution or creation. It is a matter of choice. People can choose to be gay and not to be. To the extent that they become disenchanted - they can again change their minds and choose not to be gay. There has been an attempt among pro gay scientists to pass off any hint of something that can be colored as "gay"-ness in nature as animals in homosexual relationships. The pursuit for what I've seen from it is so disengenuous that some people should be held to account for fraud.
Does it 'do' anything in the manifold? Or is it something we carry around like a baby in a gov't-approved car seat?
That's not how I understand it. At least part of the soul and spirit is so very much bound up with physical reality it would be impossible to distinquish them. And that one issue, itself, may be one of the splitting points between Judaism and Christianity.
That's a variation of Lamarkianism. It's been dead as a hypothesis for 80 years.
Has less than nothing to do with what I was speculating about. I am saying that selection as a shaping process is seen in biology, behavioral pshchology and neuroscience, and in economics, particularly free market economies.
I find it surprising that conservatives can deny the effectiveness of selection to bring order to chaotic processes.
In the pineal gland.
And your latter question gets to what is chaos and what is order. Intelligent selection, designed selection, includes more than some unionized intelligent selector sitting on some DNA assembly line, but more potently the design and parmeterization of processes, which processes may appear in the small to be random, but that are subject to a crafty process that engenders the desired result. The intelligence may be so subtle that its processes avoid discrete detection -- are not possible to distinquish from chaos, yet in aggregate it is design.
Then what stores memories if the brain doesn't?
The Scriptures in Genesis 1 indicate that all life has a nephesh which is indeed coupled to the corporeal and evidently returned to earth upon death (AFAIK). The neshama in Genesis 2, OTOH, is the breath of God, which only Adamic man has. As the breath of God, it cannot be "returned" to earth like the nephesh. God is eternal, thus the disposition of His own breath must be His will.
Then there's the ruach which best I can tell most closely corresponds to a man's intent, whether to be heavenly minded (neshama) or earthy minded (nephesh). Perhaps the ruach (and nephesh) follows the neshama into its heavenly disposition?
Anyway, that's my two cents...
Yes, it manifests in the four dimensional block of space/time. How it manifests has a great deal to do with the levels of soul and spirit which I briefly discussed above with bvw. Some of the types:
Neshama - the descendants of Adamic man have the breath of God. This may be interpreted as "ears to hear" (John 10) - a predisposition to seek God, look for answers to the deep questions, e.g. "what is the meaning of life?"
Ruach - (AFAIK) the intent of the man, willfulness - also a pivot whether to be Godly minded or earthy minded.
Nephesh - the material will of living organisms. The will to live, the want to live, the struggle to survive. Also, motherly instincts, etc.
And in turn, these intents cause the cascade of successful communication (information) in the molecular machinery to carry them out, physically - whether loving one's spouse or deciding what to eat.
You write well. I bet you could get that published in SocialText.
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