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 just finished reading Mayr's "This is Biology". He has a lot of things to say about the philosophy of science, few of them good. His basic attack on philosophy is the absence of rigor in challenging premises. Just as creationists can do the math correctly while calculating probabilities and are incapable of thinking about whether the calculation is relevant to the problem, philosophers are giants of reason, but incapable of grounding their premises in reality.
While i agree this is probably a topic for another thread, I just wanted to comment re: the above italics. Plato puts up "disclaimers" because he is not a "doctrinalizer." He did not create a systematic philosophy. The noetic quest, the zetesis, is undertaken by the man who wants to know (which basically boils down to the philosopher). The quest is forever "open" -- in the sense that there is no question that has been definitively answered, so as to be a "closed issue"; thus the philosopher must conduct his search according to his own best lights, and validate his knowledge according to a divine standard -- not according to man's "standard," let alone Plato's.
Perhaps it is an over-generalization of Plato to say that his overarching vision is that man is the microcosm, recapitulating within himself the order of the Cosmos. And just as man is the "Cosmos writ small," society -- the polis -- is "man writ large." Thus the social order essentially expresses the general type of men which constitute it. If the souls of men are in good order, a well-ordered polis will result. If not, then not.
Which is why Plato's model of the metaxy is so fascinating to me. For it suggests that the order of the soul is modelled on the order of the Cosmos. And thus we may recognize the "two poles" of the tension -- the ground of being and its beyond -- as saying something about the order of the Cosmos itself. The ground of being, the "Apeirontic depth," is the omphalos of the world. And the Epikeina -- the beyond of the Cosmos -- a sort of divine drawing, or "pull" to which all of nature responds; and most definitely the human soul can respond to it, as well.
Thus the Platonic speculation holds that the Cosmos is itself rooted in the Apeiron, and its evolution is "pulled" from a Beyond of itself.
To translate such terms into analogues of the present discussion, we might say that the Apeiron stands for the physical basis of the Universe, and the Epikeina the extra-cosmic "information set" that draws physical matter into expression as living form. For Plato considered the entire Cosmos to be One living being.
Thank you so much for writing, snarks!
Nevertheless, even if the additional experiments were to fail in duplicating a "thinking" or "memory" on the part of the amoeba - there would yet remain the "will to live".
This same "will to live" exists in all kinds of life forms - from bacteria to whales. It is also a collective will in some species, such as ants and bees. It is cooperative among the molecular machinery (cardiovascular, neural, etc.) required to sustain an organism such as man.
The "will to live" is the thrust of my preceding posts about a field-like property (being universal wrt space/time) which must exist in addition to the physical laws and constants relative to biological life to explain what we observe.
I'll speculate using poetic license that the old swaying curves of sin-cos diagrams are female-like, and that the other dimensions -- of space -- are male like. And we know -- as discussed on this thread -- all about how the fermion-male-like nature of electrons pretty much defines space and spaces to us. Warning -- the preceeding is poetic analysis.
What does an Amoeba "will" with?
The harmony between the Christian faith, the Plato philosophy and the physical universe - is magnificient to me.
That is why betty boop and I call it "field-like". A field is defined as something which exists at all points in space/time - e.g. gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak atomic.
We observe, at bottom, at the most primative levels of life, a field-like "will to live".
Using information theory to analyze molecular biology, the will is the cause, the inception or beginning of a cascade of successful communication in a living organism to accomplish that will. In the amoeba, the will to live causes it to engulf a prey.
Hello Alamo-Girl! To quibble about whether the experiment demonstrates "thinking" or "memory" seems beside the point. What the experiment shows is that the amoeba is sensitively aware and responsive to its external environment, and able to make the "right decisions" that facilitate the preservation of its life. What we see here is the "successful communication" of information to the amoeba that enables it to do just that.
Myself, maybe I have a lower critical standard, but to me it appears the amoeba has demonstrated, if not "thinking," then memory -- and learning.
I also suspect the experiment is easily replicable, and further iterations of it will show the same thing seen in this one.
But there is absolutely no *need* for an ameoba to have a kind of conscious "will" of any sort.
I have in the past done variations of this experiment using human cells which move toward beads coated with a stimulus. There is no real mystery as to the mechanism of how this happens: The cells express receptors on their surfaces which are able to detect a very shallow gradient of stimulus. The receptor activation causes a rearrangement of the actin cytoskeleton inside the cell to protrude toward the gradient source, while the rear of the cell is pulled foward. The cycle repeats itself until the source (bead) is reached.
All of this is driven by electrostatic interactions between individual molecules. The stimulus binds the receptor because it's negative and positive charged surfaces fit the pocket perfectly. The receptor changes its shape a bit after binding stimulus, so that the portion of it inside the cell is "activated". Individual actin monomers inside the cell undergo some spontanoeous polymerization the rate of which is greatly enhanced by a nucleation site ultimately provided by the activated receptor. etc. etc. etc.
Its not magical or mystical in any way whatsoever. Its just basic molecular biology.
It sure appears that way. But how it occurs is pretty well understood.
Throwing in will and consciousness and pink unicorns is simply unnecessary.
It is neither my responsibility nor my desire to construct an edifice of single refutations for each case where evolutionists weave conjecture into "fact." I'll leave the construction of philsophical minutae to those who espouse it. The bigger the edifice, the harder the fall. With 150 years of philosophical details palming themselves off as science I reckon the fall will be somewhat uncomfortable. Of course, there will always remain a handful in their ivory towers who deny reality. I happen to be acquainted with some of them.
I am sorry that I can't accept what you are saying. Trying to instill "thinking", "will", and "memory" into a single cell creature is heavy duty anthropomorphizing. Microbes "sense" through chemo or photo receptors. The reaction is automatic (let's call it ROM), it is not subject to reprogramming. If you set a trap for an Amoeba, it will fall into it every time, whether the trap is lethal or something else. An Amoeba has a bag of tricks it uses to sustain its life, if that bag is insufficient, then it either dies or goes dormant (via cyst formation) until thigs are "better".
Even "higher" organisms have these automatic responses (called instincts) that are hard wired. Take the digger wasp, for example. It catches its prey, brings it to its hole in the ground and leaves it there with the head pointing to the hole. It then goes down the hole (presumable to check out what's down there) comes back to the surface and hauls the prey down the hole, lays an egg and flies off with a smile on its face. But - if you, while the wasp is down the hole, rotate the prey, when it comes up it immediately turns the prey so its head first and goes down the hole again. As long as you keep turning the prey it will continue to check out its already checked out hole - over and over again, until you get tired. A wasp is a lot more sophisticated than an Amoeba.
I see this attempt to give simple organisms human like qualities as an attempt to instill intelligent design where there just ain't any. Sorry - there I go trying to simplify things again.
IIRC, Tulsa, Right Wing Professor has been a Presidential Young Investigator and did a PostDoc at Harvard Med.
It it not necessarily that he is *incapable* of following your argument, he is just (as yet) unfamiliar with the syntax in which it was presented.
May I suggest you borrow a page from Patrick Henry and from Ichneumon (and indeed, reply in the same civil spirit as Right Wing Professor) by providing a link to a webpage, or a book reference, which will teach the syntax of the logical string you gave earlier.
Full Disclosure: Sheesh! Now both sides are condescending!
Cheers!
Unfortunately, I have seen tht same arguments applied to evolution, by people who should otherwise know better.
Full Disclosure: Not necessarily on these threads.
Cheers!
But there is absolutely no *need* for an ameoba to have a kind of conscious "will" of any sort. I have in the past done variations of this experiment using human cells which move toward beads coated with a stimulus. There is no real mystery as to the mechanism of how this happens: The cells express receptors on their surfaces which are able to detect a very shallow gradient of stimulus. [SNIP] Its not magical or mystical in any way whatsoever. Its just basic molecular biology.
Another example is the way in which plants appear to follow a "will to live" by tilting to face the tops of their leaves towards a light source (usually the Sun). It "looks" as if the plant "consciously" leans towards the light, but what's really happening is that the side of the stalk facing the Sun receives more light and spends more of its time converting sunlight to sugars, while the side of the stalk not facing the Sun isn't so occupied, and spends more of its time growing. Through this purely "mechanical" action, the stalk naturally bends (since one side is growing faster than the other) in the direction of the light.
Similarly, how does a plant "know" that it "needs" to grow more sprouts when you prune it (or parts of it -- or its entire top -- get broken off naturally)? Quite simply: The stem tips of plants continuously produce small amounts of a hormone which which inhibits additional sprouting. But if one or more of the current stem tips are cut off, broken off, nibbled off by predators, or die off, the amount of this inhibitory hormone in the plant drops, and the plant's innate tendency to sprout is again "unleashed" and new sprouts grow. When enough new sprouts emerge and begin to produce their own inhibitory hormone, further sprouting is then disabled. In this way, the plant maintains a "reasonable" number of branch tips even in the face of damage, and without becoming overburdened with too many. All done in a mindless, "mechanical" manner. No "will" involved.
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