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.
i understand platypi hatch from eggs and then get nursed, and grow up with webfeet and hairy skin, which is why old evos rejected evidence that platypi exist..
i know new evos have figured out somewhere for them, just an example of the tree is so accommodating we can always glue more cards in..
you want me to PVNCTVATE?? then i`ll rebut from memory:
l(a
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fa
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one
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iness
Several big topics here...
1. To yourself you need NOT be an object, unless you introspect.
2. The structure of language can dictate how we perceive the world, see "pro-choice" vs. "pro-life" or Orwell's 1984 for details ("Crimethink!")
3. The structure of language may reflect pre-existing perceptions of the world, see "logical positivism", Noam Chomsky, or any college philosophy department :-(
Cheers!
Full Disclosure: Stir, stir...
Lacanians together toward the future!
This field-like willfulness which is associated with life everywhere - whether an individual amoeba, bacteria, swarm of bees, whale, man, etc. - is manifest first and foremost as a will to live, a want to live or a struggle to survive. It appears in creatures with brains, without brains and also in collectives of creatures - like ants and bees. In Scripture, Genesis 1, this is called the nephesh. The collective, the whole of physical creation, is also spoken of in Romans 8 as a "one" with willfulness. This is what may be considered a "collective consciousness".
But man is particularly willful - individually willful. He has a sense of good and evil, right and wrong, altruism and selfishness. He makes peace and war, choices for good or ill. He is uniquely and individually self aware as compared to the nephesh of all life, though he is certainly also that - having a will to live.
In Scripture, this is called a ruach. Each of us has this sense of good and evil.
And then there are certain men (not all) who have a sense of transcendence, of belonging to something much greater, beyond space/time. In Scripture parlance this would be called "ears to hear". In Genesis 2, it is called neshama - the breath of God and is unique to Adamic man - the spiritual descendants of Adam.
A man who has the neshama also has the ruach and the nephesh. It is a gradient of who he individually chooses to be.
But there is more. In addition to all of this a Christian man receives the indwelling of the Spirit of God. He becomes a new person, abiding "in" the beyond which he only previously sensed. I do not know a Hebrew word for this, however the Scriptual references include John 3, 15-20, Romans 8, I Cor 2.
To sum it all up, the individual man is an individual - a unique status among all other life. His self-will so far exceeds the "will to live" of ordinary life, that we must look beyond space/time, beyond the corporeal, to understand how it came to be.
Okay, so the platypus has been known to the Western world since the end of the 18th century (that's the 1700s to you in Rio Linda), and Darwin's theory of evolution was published around 1859. Seems to me you have a bit of a dating problem -- and your "facts" are screwed up to boot.
I gotta run now, but I look forward to reading all the replies later tonight!
since evidences against design are in the essay, i think you mean evidences against multiple life origins instead..
..true evidence against multiple origins (aka evidence for common descent) would be if odds for one species becoming another were compatible with timeframe and randomness of event necessary..evo greatly overestimates the likelihood..
evo also assumes much evidences it which could equally evidence design, which is why we keep asking to teach them together, etc yawn
Can be addictive to those predisposed to it.
Tends towards the mystical with nods to Celtic legend and folklore-type ballads.
First-class musical execution.
My fave is Live in Paris and Toronto.
Amazon.com ought to have it.
What you describe in your post #644 appears to have spatial and temporal extent and to be corporeal, insofar as it dwells within, and animates, spatiotemporal living entities. So I don't find that your description of soul as "non-corporeal, non-spatial, non-temporal" comports with your last, more detailed account. Am I misunderstanding you?
Why didn't you just mention The Force in the first place? :-)
Sing it with me: (thanks to Weird Al Yankovic)-- So we took him there
and we told the tale
how his midi-chlorians were off the scale
and he might fulfill that prophecy...
And we were singin'
My, my, this here Anakin guy
May be Vader someday later
Now he's just a small fry
and he left his home and kissed his Mommy goodbye
saying,
"Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi--
Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi"
Cheers!
She is a whiny new-age type whose music is what I would call "superficially deep"; some of her songs are IMHO the equivalent of a harlequin romance in melody (regardless of lyrics)...[snip]
My fave is Live in Paris and Toronto.
(laughing) Juxtaposition is truth.
I'll give her a listen, though, just to be sure. I've recently been listening to Don Slepian's Sea of Bliss.
If you want me to read your post, please ensure it's legible. I'm not going to waste my time trying to parse garbage like the above.
No. Nothing in your post addresses my question., which is: what kind of evidence could possible disprove design? What would evidence against design look like?
Thanks.
I’ve been gone for a while - and now, reading through these posts, I feel like FR has entered the Twilight Zone :
Serling: Picture if you will, an internet forum typing posts to each other in front of their computers discussing free-will and consciousness. The ‘scientific’ group argues and posts, in an apparent preordained binary fashion, for a materialistic view and compares consciousness ironically to a man made computer with designed software. The other group argues the intangibles that computers are not capable of, only to be told to be patient because computers will soon be made conscious in man’s image and this will prove we are merely material mechanistic agents of a mindless universe.
Did I miss something? Oh, yes… The whole Skinner shoe thing which is reminisce of Fast Times at Ridgemont High – where the Spicolli character hits his head with his Van shoe (due to the script – there was no other logical option)
Oh, what wondrous times we live in that allows mankind to rejoice in his ability to create without hindrance of a ‘box’ but merely a mindless script that we must follow ; )
Er, RightWhale, might I point out that you propose a case in which "the pot is calling the kettle black?" You simply stipulate the "I" as just another "other." No terms defined, no evidence presented, no experiment conducted. And then you blame it all on "the structure of language." Which was not forthcoming in the first place. Sheesh.
Pass the smelling salts, for i faint away! It's gonna take me a while to recover my senses from this ordeal....
But I love you anyway, dear RightWhale. :^x Thank you for writing!
Thank you, dear sister! May God ever bless you.
By "Skinner" do you refer to B. F. Skinner, famous behaviorist psychologist? If you do, we can join together and praise the man as the foremost leading expert in rat behavior that has ever graced the planet with his presence.
But might we also acknowledge that he knew absolutely zero, diddle-dee-squat about man? And might we also entertain the hypothesis that he had a particular animus towards a man like you?
I have a story i could tell about how the "Skinnerian methodology" has been made manifest in actual human lives, and what it seemed to lead to in a certain case. Since the story is intimately personal, involving a close family member, i would prefer not to tell it. Unless you think the telling might be useful to you.
I would say the rats were smarter than Skinner if one used his own reasoning which existed in a box he created and observed to fit the views he desired. I ironically say, ‘42’ to Skinner’s ideals…
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