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.
Asleep at the switch?
Don't worry, I won't tell GrandMaster...for a fee.
Huh? Where do you draw the conclusion that this does (or did) or must (or should be presumed to) happen "suddenly"?
Additionally I would suggest a more appropriate formulation of this question would be, "how DID inanimate matter come to life?". So far as we know this only happened once. So far as we know -- save for the original incident(s) -- all living things come from other living things, and all living cells from other living cells. Indeed these are generally considered "laws" of biology: that all life is composed of cells (there are some partial exceptions to this) and that all cells come from other cells. IOW how life "begins" (present tense) is a non-applicable question. The correct question is how life "began" (past tense). Since then life has but persisted in a continuous stream.
I thought all the litte blue things called smurfs died a horrible death a long time ago.
He knows all. And he knows that you've just earned yourself another six months in the janitorial pool. Darwin Central demands obedience.
You prefer a fungal instead?
bookmark
Aaarrgghh!!! If it didn't create such a mess I'd just kick the bucket!
I loathed them enough to reanimate them so I could kill them all, all over again.
Actually you make my point for me. It is not something that CAN be so defined. To complicate matters further, there will come a day when we can make machines that will meet ALL of those requirements. Will those machines really be alive?
There are and always will be some things that science can't touch. Reminds me of those miniature candy bars that used to come in assorted bags around Halloween and the packaging on each bar said, "Fun Size!" Has science ever been able to define or measure fun? Or hope? Or love? Or worry or anger? Yet not only do we know instinctively what they are but we can even make comparisons of quantity and quality of each, e.g., I had more fun this time than last year.
In the same way, we know instinctively what life is, whether something is alive or not, and inanimate matter ain't it. (Otherwise we wouldn't know to call it inanimate.)
Some things can't be defined or dissected in a laboratory because words and science are instruments that are far too crude. Such things strongly imply the existence of a realm beyond the physical.
Thats what I like about you, you really know how to have fun. You are truly a fungi.
I had that once, but better washing habits took care of it.
Such things are properly termed, "supernatural," and are outside the realm of science
1. If we create devices which meet all those criteria, then yes, they shall be truly alive. The real tough question revolves around whether things which do NOT meet all of those criteria can be considered alive.
There are and always will be some things that science can't touch. Reminds me of those miniature candy bars that used to come in assorted bags around Halloween and the packaging on each bar said, "Fun Size!" Has science ever been able to define or measure fun? Or hope? Or love? Or worry or anger? Yet not only do we know instinctively what they are but we can even make comparisons of quantity and quality of each, e.g., I had more fun this time than last year.
2. Science can measure and define fun, love, worry, anger. I refer you to neurochemistry and biochemistry.
In the same way, we know instinctively what life is, whether something is alive or not, and inanimate matter ain't it. (Otherwise we wouldn't know to call it inanimate.)
3. You believe you "instinctively" know life when you see it. I'm willing to bet that you can be fooled on that score. I know as fact that many people do NOT automatically recognize life when they see it, and have mistaken non-life for life from time to time.
Some things can't be defined or dissected in a laboratory because words and science are instruments that are far too crude. Such things strongly imply the existence of a realm beyond the physical.
4. No. Non-sequitur. You leave out the "yet". Many things are well explained by 21st century scientific methods which were inexplicable in the 19th century.
yes, indeed: I was cast in that mold.
What "things," how do you know this, and are you sure you're correct?
Yeast you become too cocky, I lichen your situation to a small boy with no morels looking to get into truffle.
I carrot deny it, you beet me
A: Life
Circular argument.
Q: The dividing line between lifelessness and life, what exactly is it?
A: There is no dividing line.
This would appear to contradict your first answer above.
Q: In other words, how does inanimate matter suddenly (and literally) come to life?
A: Ingestion and digestion, but it doesn't happen suddenly.
We have machines that ingest and digest on one level or another. Have they come to life? And besides, of course it happens suddenly -- you have a thing that is either ingesting/digesting or it isn't. There is an infinitessimal point in time between the last moment when said thing isn't ingesting or digesting and the first moment when it is. There's no in between or limbo period for this any more than there is such a thing as being partially pregnant.
Q: 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?
A: It does not differ at all.
As I said in my original post, I anticipated this answer. But to believe this is so has consequences for humanity that are disastrous, e.g., that no living thing has any more inherent value than any piece of inanimate matter. As Dennis Prager put it: "Only if there is a God who created man is man worth anything beyond the chemicals of which he is composed." Throwing a soda can or a baby out of a moving car must therefore be either two equally moral, equally immoral, or (for any disaffected college students or other budding nihilists present) equally amoral acts; but it is not possible under such a belief system to say that one is any more or less moral than the other.
No, this is not a thread on philosophy or religion or morality per se, but my point with the previous post and this one are to show that at the end of the day, all are inextricably linked...
So now you just turnip your nose at me.
Uh well, actually they did.
And I'm pretty sure it was all Bush's fault ;-)
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