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.
IOW, "I think, therefore I am."
...the observation that souls are not entities definable within the "language" of the 3+1D spacetime continuum; they are outside of it altogether and unavailable for inspection by observers who base their observations on sensual perception of phenomena within the 3+1D block.
That's the impression I've gotten from Alamo-Girl, too, betty. And, as you point out later in your post, there is a long tradition of speaking about a special sort of access to 'higher truths' that some possess, but most don't possess. However, from your description of souls, I would have trouble distinguishing between them and, say, phlogiston or the ether of early electromagnetic theory.
I'm sure you know that once 'special insight' as a means of truth-acquisition is invoked, the realm of science is forsaken and the realm of it's-true-because-I-say-it's-true is rapidly being approached. Much of the success of the scientific method in the last 400 years or so is owed to its rejection of 'special insight' as a means of acquisition of truth about the world and our place in it.
Since you mentioned Plato, the fact is, there are only a few places in which Plato allows himself to be carried away into fits of transcendentalism (and even then he immediately brings the conversation back down to earth)—Socrates' account in Symposium of his conversation with Diotima, the last few pages of Book VII of Republic, the myth of Er in Book X of Republic, the myth of the charioteer in Phaedrus, the first few pages of Timaeus' 'likely story' in Timaeus, Book X of Laws (maybe), a handful of lines in the disuputed Epistle VII, and maybe one or two other places. Most of the time, Plato allows his characters to discuss and reason about principles and ideas familiar to most educated people of his day. He wasn't a scientist, but he also wasn't a monger of mysticism. After all, he founded the Academy, the world's first institution of higher education.
Best regards...
But it's not unfair to say the scientific method has limits and has been abused when making claims about the aspects of the human experience that traditional Christianity considers unmeasurable.
Much of the success of the scientific method in the last 400 years or so is owed to its rejection of 'special insight' as a means of acquisition of truth about the world and our place in it.But it's not unfair to say the scientific method has limits and has been abused when making claims about the aspects of the human experience that traditional Christianity considers unmeasurable.
Perhaps the scientific method does have limits, but it's not so easy to say what they are when speaking about this or that particular subject. Questions that were at one time deemed to be beyond the ability of scientific investigation have regularly turned out not to be; e.g., What is the Moon made of?, How far away is the Moon?, What is the Sun made of?, How far away is the Sun?, What are the stars made of?, How far away are the stars?, What causes people to get sick?, etc., etc.
As for the aspects of the human experience that traditional Christianity deems unmeasurable, if they're unmeasurable, how do we know anything about them? We're back to 'special insight', I guess. But what if your special insight and my special insight disagree? Must we give up the idea of there being an objective (approximation to) truth that we can agree upon in such cases?
Difficult questions.
I had a weird dream a couple weeks ago. Often i dream of graphical objects. i haven't got a clue why, but i do. And in the dream, I understood that what i was looking at was a representation of the Universe. I can't describe the image in words, except to say that it was folded back on itself. To put it in a nutshell, I really don't understand what I saw. But I got to thinking about the etymology of the word, "universe": Literally, from the Latin roots, the word means "one turn" -- "uni" + "verso." Or loosely (to my way of thinking) "to turn back on one's self," i.e., to fold. Go figure!!! :^)
I'm still wondering about it. Fun for speculation!
Thanks so much for writing, bvm!
Oh I don't dispute this, and i do see the danger all too well. But it seems the best way to avoid the danger is not to go chasing after self-proclaimed "experts." Or even better, do your own thinking.
With respect to Plato, what is most of interest to me is the meditative process he used in order to access "ultimate" ideas as, say, the Agathon; and the "field" in which the meditative mind "ascends" and "descends" in the "in-between reality" of the metaxy, the psyche stretched in-between, as it were, the "poles" of the Apeiron (the ground of being) and the Epikeina (the "beyond" of the Cosmos). It is this "area" (I hate to use the word, for it implies spatial extension which the metaxy does not have: it is a "psychic space," which may be a contradiction in terms, but it's hard to match words to this experience of reality) that the mind is free to be drawn to the truth of the Cosmos "from within," as it were.
This process of ascent and descent is symbolized in Plato's Myth of the Cave.... FWIW
Thank you for writing, snarks!
LOL!!! Well i don't know about the "therefore" part; but it does seem that life and consciousness (of some type) are at least most intimately correlated.
Hi Alamo-Girl! I meant to ping you to #746 but got distracted. Sorry!
I don't understand that Lipton is 'into' information theory either in cosmology or psychology. He said that the entire body acts as an individual cell would act, same functions, same purpose, except it is a whole collective, a society of a kind. Every attribute the body has, any cell also has. The reasoning function that we take to be located in the central nervous system takes place in the cell wall. He is very discouraged by the great buildup and subsequent disappointment of decyphering the genome--that there was nothing there after all, it explains nothing and is not the key to knowing how life works.
I am not going to accede to that claim. These entities are strongly linked to our cellular structure, and the cells are locatable in the manifold. Talking of souls that have incorporeal existence outside of space, time, and therefore outside of causality, carries no meaning in our world. The extra dimensions, one of them at least, are possibly large enough that a cell would be able to maneuver in that 5th direction, and might be in communication with many other cells through that very small but finite dimension. This is bound to be more useful for us to consider than that a soul is floating around waiting to pounce upon a new body.
Placemarker, back later.
Did someone on FREE REPUBLIC just ask why they should read Hayek?
Please, tell me you aren't being serious.
Hey professor that`s a good one!! never thought you`d dodge my proof of your error by professing ignorance of logic..
Like I said it`s ok (OK??), I can use caps if it helps.. you probly didn`t like my e e cummings quote before either.
Anyone can see I showed the logic error of 2 of the 29 arguments and of your interps of it.. and can see you have dodged and not admitted any of these errors.
In English, the article assumes that design cannot copy the proteins or DNA in a cell.. but evolutionists also argue their own design can copy the proteins or DNA.. if we fund them again.
You assume iIrc that because you can map a lexical tree, evolution is likely.. but you could also map a lexical tree if design is true.. so your whales don`t help you.
Mebbe someone else will kindly explain these logic errors.. I was trying to cover for you by giving you a graceful retreat..
Otherwise I really like your trees, they look easy as PIE (protoindoeuropean, Pokorny`s linguistics `proof` of evolution)
Care to refute me professor?
what observations disprove design?? good question, some answers are on my homepage..
some obvious results of a disorderly origin:
1 odds are no life exists
2 if life exists odds are not for long
3 if life exists very long odds are no species arise
4 if species exist odds are they won`t self-observe
easily disproved by observation..
yes i know evos will incant `wap sap fap` because they are religious zealots but alas these are exactly what you ask.. those who invoke the sap deity have no right inquisiting id
other results of disorderly origin:
5 chaos theory would find true chaos, instead it finds orderly chaos
6 young earth impossible, instead yec is hotly debated and censored
7 multiple life origins impossible, instead created kinds hotly debated and censored
8 spontaneous origin impossible, instead abiogenesis remains still totally unworkable
hope this helps..God bless you
you didn`t get it either..it`s all there in hs logic..you are not showing yourself able to observe design
I did get it obviously youdidnt. everyone can see thab.
Aside from hving nothing to do with my question and being incomprehensible, it's OK.
What kind of evidence would change your mind about design. A number of people have posted kinds of evidence that would discredit evolution, but what is imopssible under design?
ROTFL, this is in fact a determinant characteristic of true programmers. The Deity is the most irresponsible, carefree, profligate programmer of them all.
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