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.
Physics professor, noted for his determination to prove that humans have free will, was taken to the campus emergency room after he was discovered to have been overcome by what one physician described as an extreme case of "colonic shoe intrusion syndrome," which he declined to describe further. After briefly regaining consciousness, and being asked what had happened, the stricken physicist mysteriously repeated William Wallace's final cry: "Freedom!!"
One of the problems with associating thinking, willfulness and memory with the brain is that we also see it in biological systems where there is no brain.
The amoeba, for instance, which has been exposed to Chinese ink, will remember the experience and refuse to go for it the next time.
The will to live exists in all living organisms, from bacteria to whales. And even if one uses the Shannon definition (successful communications) to delineate between what is life v non-life/death - viruses have the will to live.
This is prima facie evidence that the will does not exist in the physical brain.
betty boop suggests that consciousness is field-like for an individual. I believe we are on the same "wave length" in that regard.
I perceive the "will to live" being universal (perhaps a field) or perhaps global to this biosphere, i.e. Fecundity principle, the evolution of one. Thus the phenomenon of collective consciousness among bees, ants, etc. - and the trend to autonomy, semiosis and self-organizing complexity. In Scriptures this might be the nephesh spoken of in Genesis 1, the soul of living creatures and perhaps the will of the "creature" (the whole) as described in Romans 8.
But man has a much greater willfulness than this - a sense of good and evil, right and wrong, altruism and selfishness, etc. He is much more likely to rebel against the natural order of things. All physical laws are obeyed in non-life and in life but man seeks to overcome their constraints by his inventions whether airplanes or refrigerators or by experiments in the physics lab. He rebels against nature as well, growing plants out-of-season, inventing new breeds and cloning sheep. He wages war and peace. In Scriptures this would be called the ruach.
Men (or at least some men) also have a sense of reality which transcends the measurable, i.e. space/time. It is as if he knows he belongs to something much greater, or that he doesn't belong "here". He seeks Truth. He seeks God. In Scriptures this would be called the neshama or ‘breath of God’.
In “My Credo” Einstein framed it this way:
I'm sorry, but amoebas are cells and neurons are cells. The fact that neurons are specialized is not evidence that other cells can't learn or have other sensitivities, such as photosensivity or magnetic orientation.
I don't think the philosophical problem of free will can be solved, but operationally, the sense of free will is most noticable when we engage in non-coerced, non-habitual activity. Dreaming dreams of things that are not, but might be.
The "will to live" is voluntary, i.e. willful. Specialization, function and capability are involuntary, i.e. circumstantial.
Since you brought it up, it is fascinating to note that the “will to live” accrues to the autonomous organism or collective (in the case of ants and bees). All of the composite molecular machinery (cardiovascular, neural, digestive, etc.) integrates to that purpose for the organism or collective.
The “theory of evolution” does not address these things – the will to live, the autonomy, the integration of function to purpose, information (successful communication) and semiosis (encoding/decoding).
All of this is related to the study of complexity in biological systems - an endeavor of the mathematicians who have been invited to the evolution table. That may have been a “fatal attraction” since these are also related to the objections raised by the Intelligent Design supporters whether they see the Designer as God, aliens (panspermia, cosmic ancestry, astrobiology) or collective consciousness.
I see your "will to live" as part of a failed attempt to reduce biology to physics. Matter has different properties and behaviors at different levels of organization. Physics can set limits to the component behavior of matter, but it cannot predict the behavior of matter at biological levels of organization.
Your problem concerning the will to live is really just a restatement of the problem of abiogenesis, which is admittedly unsolved.
Yet growers of saw grit diamonds, wanting more edge then face, will use some poison (water) in the growth mix. The water keeps the face down.
That is the grower's mix of things is very important. In studying evolution -- especially from fossil inference, the little influences -- the poisons, the catalysts, the seed start points -- can not be discerned beyond some extent or in rare circumstance.
Oddly enough, js1138, I think the very reverse of this statement is actually the truth of the matter. I'll explain why in a minute, but first I wonder about your use of the terms, the "sense of free will" being "noticeable." I wonder whether free will is a "sensible" or "noticeable" thing in the first place. At least not in the sense of an isolatable entity. Free will is something that can only be seen in its effects. "Dreaming of things that are not, but might be," seems not a good indication of the presence of free will, but only of the presence of an active imagination whose projects are yet unrealized. I think free will, like love, is an action, not a proper noun.
It seems the best place to observe free will in action would precisely be where force is being relentlessly applied to constrain it. Say, a concentration camp. This was psychologist Viktor Frankl's insight. He was incarcerated by Hitler during World War II (I don't remember which concentration camp), but he managed to survive. While in the camp, he made many observations of how different prisoners reacted to the horrors of their situation. He was struck by extraordinary acts of selfless kindness, of self-denial for the benefit of someone more in need than one's self, as well as situations in which prisoners "just gave up" and psychologically, virtually catatonically withdrew into themselves, "beaten by the system," as it were, and practically speaking the dead victims of it while still alive. Based on these observations, Frankl's conclusion was that a man's final freedom is his sovereign ability to choose how he will react in any given situation.
I read two of his books, years ago -- so I'm going by memory here. But I'd like to recommend them to you: Man's Search for Meaning, and The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy. Both are extraordinary. The first recapitulates the concentration camp experiences; the second is what I would call a "humanization" of Freud's and Jung's psychological "theories." (IMHO both really need it. I put "theories" in quotation marks here because it is striking, remarkable to me how relentlessly unscientific both men were in their methods....)
FWIW. Thanks for writing!
Instead of your own predilection (misrepresented by the way as "common sense") why don't you go ask the people you have have carried that story along in far more detail, preserving it for generation after generation. In other words do some research -- ask the experts. Why suffer a burden of misunderstanding when you might -- in true scientific researcher fashion -- resolve the issue. Certainly it would add to your understanding, and who wouldn't look to add to accurate understandings?
p.s.: I left out another type of prisoner response to the concentration camp experience: Those who chose to collude with the Nazis against their own fellow prisoner, in hopes of receiving better treatment, in hopes of improving their chances of survival. Up to and including sheparding their fellow prisoners to the gas chamber....
Sounds like The Angry American by Toby Keith.
Only the boot is supposed to go in the other guy's *ss, dummy!
Cheers!
For instance, information in biological systems is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state. Each bit gained has a corresponding dissipation of energy in the local surroundings (thermodynamics).
IOW, even though the biological organism acts willfully, it must always pay the tab of the physical laws in space/time.
The issue at bottom is the rise of complexity in biological systems - information, autonomy, semiosis. It may or may not look at abiogenesis v biogenesis. Complexity arose all along the fossil record. The investigators are mathematicians and physicists; the two main avenues are algorithmic information theory (Kolmogorov complexity) and self-organizing complexity (the von Neumann challenge).
IMHO, the biologists seem to have a much too simple concept of what life is. H.H. Pattee said they weren't even interested in the question.
I've read Man's Search for Meaning (40 years ago!). And, of course, there is the defiant slave laborer in the movie, Dr. Zhivago ("I am the only free man here").
Resistence to tyranny is politically interesting, but I don't believe it is a special case when discussing free will. The philosophical problem of free will revolves around the question of motivation. Where there is motive there is a determining factor. I don't think resistence presents any puzzles over motivation. If anything, one's choices are limited to submission or defiance.
I am not terribly impressed by the problem of deciding. Deciding implies a multiple choice list of options, all motivated. For me, the curious problems involve creativity and production of novel things. Given your prison camp scenerio, I am impressed by the guys who built a glider in the attic -- the true story inspiration for the movie Chicken Run.
Perhaps an overstatement, here?
Other suggestions:
"does not always"
"need not"
"can [exist] in other places besides"
And then we have the whole problem of "instinct" e.g. see some accounts in When The Air Hits Your Brain by neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick, where he recounts removing most of the brain of cats, and the reactions of the cats' owners afterwards that "they couldn't tell the difference". In other words, much behavior may be ingrained in muscle memory or elsewhere, without the brain being required to perform the action--but the brain may still play a role in when, how often, how extreme the action is performed, and in regard to what stimuli.
In other words, how sure are you that the situation must be an "either / or " ??
Cheers! [Full Disclosure : Just stirring the pot]
This sounds quite similar to a point made by G.K. Chesterton (IIRC, in Orthodoxy).
Cheers!
PS--DON'T think about Pink Elephants! /grin
I would add however that where the autonomous organism (like the cat) is comprised of molecular machinery (cardiovascual, neural, digestive, etc.) integrated to the purpose of satisfying the organism's will to live --- that the brain is the most frequent (but perhaps not exclusive) site of the origination (inception or beginning) of the cascade of information (successful communication) throughout the organism to accomplish its will.
This is based on the Shannon "mathematical theory of communications" - which is the bedrock to "information theory and molecular biology". Shannon's theory is the basis of the field, "information theory".
Information is the "reduction of uncertainty in the receiver or molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state". It is the action, not the message. The value or meaning of the message is irrelevant to the theory.
To stir the pot (two ways):
Recently, Right Wing Professor has confidently predicted the ability to model (say on a large cluster of PC's) an entire cell from the governing physical and/or chemical equations. Do you agree?
Or (to put it another way), do you feel the inability to predict behaviour at biological levels of organization is due to
a) 'emergent' properties at sufficent complexity
b) "we just don't have enough horsepower"
c) grey_whiskers hasn't been following the thread closely enough and "I just answered this d*mn point, *ssshole!" /rueful grin
Dear js1138, you stipulate as if the matter you describe had been already validated. So please allow me to counter-stipulate on the same terms.
Consciousness is not unattached from the brain. Unless the brain is dead, of course. The brain is like a kind of geiger counter, recording the activity of neuronal firings, etc., etc. That is to say the brain is not the cause of the neuronal firings, etc., etc. It facilitates them, and can produce a read-out if properly hooked up to an EEG. Then we, the observer can look at the read-out, recognize patterns of activity, etc., etc. But we cannot say that the brain knows anything about that, or is "aware" of these activities.
Consciousness also includes unconscious states; dreaming is likely a good example of such. Consciousness also includes self-consciousness, which (apparently) is an attribute of humans only (as far as we know). But all living organisms -- definitely including Alamo-Girl's amoeba, which in the experiment was observed to "learn" the difference between india ink and a food source, so as not to mistake the former for the latter, and so "wouldn't be fooled again" -- possess some type of sentience, awareness -- and these are things that also belong to consciousness. So I agree with Alamo-Girl: even living organisms that do not have organized brains still have access to some form of consciousness.
And so I think that consciousness in all its forms (including dreaming) definitely belongs to the real world; for it is the distinctive, perhaps determinative, attribute of all living things in some form or fashion.
You said you thought A-G was trying to reduce biology to physics. As I'm somewhat aware of her thoughts in this matter, I'd hazard to say that what she's about is to rescue biology from physics -- in the sense that biology isn't reducible to the physical laws. Or to put it another way, living organisms have a physical basis, plus something else which is not physical. The latter is what makes them living. (Alamo-Girl, please correct the record if I've misrepresented your views here.)
You wrote: "Freeper tortoise has assurred us that AI researches have a handle on what needs to be done to simulate this in silicon, but adds the stipulation that we can't build the hardware yet...."
The operative word in this statement, it seems to me, is simulate. Obviously, before someone may "simulate" something, there must first be a something to simulate. That something, however, remains unaffected, whether the simulation is successful or not: Either way, it continues to be the something it is.
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