Posted on 10/12/2005 10:43:32 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
Dr. Behe opened his public lecture by showing two images: a mountain range and Mount Rushmore.
One had a designer; the other didn’t. In case anyone was uncertain which was which, Dr. Behe also showed a duck, and emphasized that if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.
Ergo if something in biology looks designed, it is designed.
He reviewed “irreducible complexity,” the important notion that certain structures with intricately interacting parts cannot function if any part is removed. According to Dr. Behe, such structures could not evolve gradually, as standard Darwinian Theory supposes; they must be the handiwork of a designer.
Well-known examples include mousetraps, the blood-clotting cascade, the vertebrate immune system and the bacterial flagellum. All of this was covered in his 1996 book, “Darwin’s Black Box.” Dr. Behe spent quite a bit of time talking about reviews of his book, and his responses to reviews.
Surprisingly, he had nothing to say about new developments in ID. Surely this revolutionary approach to biology has produced important scientific insights in the last nine years. Let’s use the Web to discover what they are.
Use Google to find “Entrez PubMed,” which will take you to a database of 15 million peer-reviewed publications in the primary scientific literature. The site, maintained by the National Library of Medicine, allows users to enter a search term and retrieve references to relevant publications.
For instance, enter “natural selection” in the search box and click “go”; about 14,000 references will be found. “Mutation” gets 40,000. “Speciation” gets 5,000. “Human origins” gets 22,000. “Behe intelligent design” gets … zero.
Not one publication in PubMed contains the terms “Behe,” “intelligent,” and “design.” The same holds for “Behe irreducible complexity.” A less restrictive search for “intelligent design” finds 400 papers, but many are not relevant because the words are common in other contexts.
To get more useful information, enter “intelligent design” in quotation marks, which searches for the two words together. When I searched last week, this produced 25 references, of which 13 were irrelevant to this discussion, five were news articles, six were critical of ID, and one was a historical review. “Irreducible complexity” in quotes gets five hits, one irrelevant and the others critical of ID.
Exact numbers change daily as new publications are added to the database, but the pattern is clear. Where are the scientific papers supporting ID?
Perhaps Dr. Behe publishes research papers that support intelligent design without using those terms. Searching PubMed for “Behe MJ” and sorting the results by date, you will find 11 publications since 1992, when the good professor converted to his new Ideology. Several are just letters to the editor.
The most recent (Behe and Snoke, 2004 and 2005) suggest that certain events in molecular evolution have low probability of occurrence.
This falls far short of the claim that a designer must have intervened, but what the heck, let’s put all 11 in the ID column.
Under these rather generous assumptions, ID’s leading light has produced fewer than a dozen peer-reviewed papers for the cause, none of which explicitly mentions ID. That number is substantially less than PubMed finds for “voodoo” (78), and pales in comparison with “diaper rash” (475).
Perhaps when the number of supporting publications rises to the level of “horse feces” (929) the professional community will grant ID some respect.
Cynics will suggest that ID is intentionally excluded from the peer-reviewed literature. It’s possible; the system strives for objectivity, but any human endeavor is potentially subject to bias.
This argument fails, however, when we consider that other revolutionary ideas have successfully crashed the party. Plate tectonics, major meteoritic impacts, and the bacterial origin of mitochondria are important ideas that were initially regarded with skepticism but are now accepted by the professional community.
Non-Darwinian molecular evolution, so-called “neutral theory,” was despised when it was first proposed in the late 1960s, but within a decade it became a standard part of the literature.
The historical evidence suggests that scientists can be persuaded to new views, given appropriate evidence. The primary literature is particular, but not rigid.
While you’re at PubMed, try searching for “bacterial flagella secretion.” One of the resulting papers, by SI Aizawa (2001), reports that some nasty bacteria possess a molecular pump, called a type III secretion system, or TTSS, that injects toxins across cell membranes.
Much to Dr. Behe’s distress, the TTSS is a subset of the bacterial flagellum. That’s right, a part of the supposedly irreducible bacterial “outboard motor” has a biological function!
When I asked Dr. Behe about this at lunch he got a bit testy, but acknowledged that the claim is correct (I have witnesses). He added that the bacterial flagellum is still irreducibly complex in the sense that the subset does not function as a flagellum.
His response might seem like a minor concession, but is very significant. The old meaning of irreducible complexity was, “It doesn’t have any function when a part is removed.” Evidently, the new meaning of irreducible complexity is “It doesn’t have the same function when a part is removed.”
The new definition renders irreducible complexity irrelevant to evolution, because complex adaptations are widely thought to have evolved through natural selection co-opting existing structures for new functions, in opportunistic fashion.
The story is incomplete, but it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that the bacterial flagellum evolved first as a secretory system, and later was adapted by natural selection for locomotion.
This scenario for gradual evolution of a complex molecular machine is bolstered by recent reports that some bacterial flagella do, in fact, have a secretory function (and now you know how to find those papers).
The irreducibly complex teeters on the verge of reduction. None of these difficulties were mentioned in the public lecture.
It seems that a new image should be added to Dr. Behe’s public presentation, one that represents the scientific status of intelligent design: a duck on its back, feet in the air, wings splayed.
If it looks like a dead duck, and it smells like a dead duck, it is a dead duck.
James Curtsinger is a University professor in the department of ecology, evolution and behavior. Please send comments to letters@mndaily.com.
No.
Explosion of nothing? That is a hard act to follow.
Ok. Let's start over. I apologize for being rude.
I have a tendency to pick up these conversations where I left off with the last person. In this case, I've spent several days in a useless attempt to get through to someone that their point that because humans can "design" stuff is irrelevant to the question of whether life was designed.
The link I posted I believe is very interesting because it discusses the mechanism for how ERV viruses on very rare occasions attack the reproductive cells of individuals, but fail to kill the cell, which then goes on to pass the broken virus DNA sequence down to all it's ancestors. We have found several thousand such virus DNA sequences common in humans and apes. The pattern is not *totally* matched, but the amount of difference between various ape species does match the morphological evolution tree for how much time we think has passed since the split of the common ancestor of each branch. In other words, the differences in ERV DNA insertions is direct confirmation of the ape/human family tree.
This is the smoking gun of common ancestry of apes and humans, and the best evidence that evolution not only occurs, but that man is indeed descended from earlier ape species.
When you go to the link, ignore the first half dozen paragraphs. The original poster was chewing out a particularly stubborn anti-evolutionist. Below those paragraphs is some very interesting explanations of how ERV viruses work, how they get their DNA sequences into creatures, and what that evidence means to common ancestry.
If this were 1927, you'd be correct. In 2005, the big bang is an expansion of a singularity. No explosion. No matter.
apology accepted. I will read what is at the link.
"This explosion is known as the Big Bang. At the point of this event all of the matter and energy of space was contained at one point. What exisisted prior to this event is completely unknown and is a matter of pure speculation."
Note abv.....
All the references I checked, refer to both matter and energy present at the big bang.
Sometimes people find it hard to understand why the big bang is not a black hole. After all, the density of matter in the first fraction of a second was much higher than that found in any star, and dense matter is supposed to curve space-time strongly. At sufficient density there must be matter contained within a region smaller than the Schwarzschild radius for its mass. Nevertheless, the big bang manages to avoid being trapped inside a black hole of its own making and paradoxically the space near the singularity is actually flat rather than curving tightly. How can this be?
The short answer is that the big bang gets away with it because it is expanding rapidly near the beginning and the rate of expansion is slowing down. Space can be flat while space-time is not. The curvature can come from the temporal parts of the space-time metric which measures the deceleration of the expansion of the universe. So the total curvature of space-time is related to the density of matter but there is a contribution to curvature from the expansion as well as from any curvature of space. The Schwarzschild solution of the gravitational equations is static and demonstrates the limits placed on a static spherical body before it must collapse to a black hole. The Schwarzschild limit does not apply to rapidly expanding matter.
Sounds like you're reading the kiddie books again. But you got post 100.
I was taught in basic physics that matter cannot be made or destroyed, changed, yes.
You have a good day.
1) I don't know anyone who came to know God because their mind was changed about evolution. But I know a lot of people who have changed their mind about evolution because they came to know God.
2) You can tell me all about the big bang and non-creator theories of the origin of the universe, but until you can convincingly tell me how all this 'stuff' that is the universe came into existence, then you just are a snake oil salesman asking me to trust that science just hasn't progressed to that point yet.
The origins of the universe are not part of the Theory of Evolution. That's a red herring.
XenuDidit placemark
Matter is simply a form of energy, and energy is constantly popping into existence (and out again) as paired particles (c.f. zero-point energy).
As to matter, matter and energy are interchangeable, as documented in E=mc2.
Also no one really knows what the singularity was at the instant it started expanding.
The Big Bang was not an explosion. It was the rapid expansion of space-time.
He means going backward in time from the creation of matter, not forward. As in, what happened before the creation of matter?
a) Wouldn't this third option require proving not one but TWO negatives?
b) The God I speak of is the creator of everything, including time itself, to which he would not be subject. He lives in an eternal present that knows no passage of time any more than it knows the limitations of the 3 dimensions of space. This God by definition would never have not existed -- there would not be any pre-God or post-God -- so you must be referring to a different god, a sort of naturalistic god that emerged from the universe instead of being its creator.
I'm not referring to any God, actually. Quite the contrary, I'm referring to the absence of gods.
There is no God, gotcha.
Allow me to ask some questions that, while philosophy is hardly evolutionary science, I believe will have scientific implications nonetheless.
I submit that there are some things that are irreducible. What is it that separates living things from inanimate matter? The dividing line between lifelessness and life, what exactly is it? In other words, how does inanimate matter suddenly (and literally) come to life?
Or does the naturalist/atheist posit that what we call life, biology, in plants and animals is different from the activity of molecules or subatomic particles only in degree, not in kind?
Probably the answer is yes.
But if so, it doesn't answer how a lump of carbon eventually develops the ability to act and move under its own power. It would also mean that every scientific field of study is just a specialized field within biology because everything is alive -- or that there is no such thing as biology at all because ultimately everything is dead.
But there is a sharper line of irreducibility: that between the amorality of inanimate matter, all plants, and all other animals on the one hand -- and the morality instinct unique to humans? How does a creature suddenly one day have a moral instinct?
Or is this too an illusion cast by cold determinism, rendering all moral thought meaningless?
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