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.
Well, one's a real fun guy and the other a real fun gal.
Neither would I, but so far that's what you seem to be saying. But perhaps I have misunderstood -- so tell me what the difference is between a device and a baby.
2.a. you assume that measuring the physics and chemistry fails to measure the feeling. I do not.
There a lot of different feelings and activities that can trigger the same neurochemical response. Frivolous fun and relaxing study of philosophy can pump in equal amounts of endorphins just as worry, fear, and anxiety can trigger equal amounts of reduction of serotonin re-uptake.
Then you have people who are good at hiding their feelings to the point where it would significantly alter neurochemical readings from a normal response range.
Then you have people whose neurochemistry (like mine) is deformed from birth and also significantly alters the results from normal. It's endless.
All you can really tell from measuring neurochemistry changes is changes in neurochemistry. The quality and nature and even quantity of these feelings cannot be revealed by the results since there are endless ways to deliberately or inadvertently or even congenitally mask them. So, again, what is a unit of fun as opposed to, say, a unit of serenity? How do you tell one from the other from reading endorphin levels?
2.b. spirit? we were discussing material LIFE, were we not?
This is the point where we part ways and makes my point. Your view of what life is is purely material, mine is of a spiritual nature. I mean that not condescendingly or in any other arrogant or obnoxious way, so I hope you don't take offense. But it just shows the difference in what we're talking about and how we're apparently talking past each other. You see living beings, humans included, as just machines or matter no different at their core than the atoms they are made of; I see them as inanimate matter animated by an eternal soul that is irreducible.
Ah, but you fail to take into account that what one might call art, another might call crap; what one might call porn, andother might call art. We are trying for something a *little* more concrete than such "instinctual" rubbish.
Actually I did take that into account. True, I didn't address it in any of my posts but I took it into account by anticipating this point from you and letting you bring it up, in part so my already lengthy posts wouldn't be longer than they are.
First I will stipulate that anyone can be fooled about anything at any time, including you and me. But the fact that we can be fooled doesn't mean we are fools. The fact that we don't know everything doesn't mean we cannot know anything; that is skepticism at its (ironically enough) most sophomoric. As I said before, I have been fooled into thinking a discarded hose was a snake in the right lighting (or lack thereof). But that doesn't mean I don't know what a snake is.
Second, as for your point about art, your point makes my point. For the very reasons you give, it is extremely difficult to give a precise, dare I say "scientific", definition of what art is. Yet most of the time, even if we think something is BAD art (crap as you said), we are somehow still able to quickly recognize that it's at least an ATTEMPT at art.
Same with pornography -- for the very reasons you give, it is difficult to impossible to give a 'scientific' definition of pornography. Yet most of the time we can tell when someone is genuinely making an effort to create art using the naked body and when it's just straight ahead porn. To make matters even more confusing for those who would attempt such a definition, you can have completely naked bodies that are portrayed very artistically and you can have fully clothed bodies that are portrayed extremely pornographically.
In other words, most of the time -- say again, most of the time -- we are generally able to quickly and accurately discern the intent behind these things in ways that science can only crudely measure at best, just like a deer is able to very quickly and accurately discern that it needs to drink water from a stream without needing a precise scientific definition of what is a stream or what is water. Yes, it can be fooled sometimes into thinking other liquids are water with fatal results, but that does not mean that it doesn't know on this instinctive, very unscientific level what water is.
4. Again, we were discussing material LIFE, are we not? Changing the game and moving the goalposts like that just ain't cricket.
This would be to say that I already agreed with your point before the debate even begins. My point from the beginning has been that life is NOT a strictly material affair. I'm not sure how you could have missed that; if you did, what did you think was the subject of our debate?
As stated earlier, you are looking at things from such a strictly naturalist point of view -- and so much so that you somehow assumed I was too even with endless clues that I wasn't. The whole point of my argument is that there is more to this world and universe than just the physical or the material -- and that if I am wrong, it renders everything meaningless. Science and philosophy (especially religion) may endlessly talk past each other and drive each other nuts, but in this way they are forever joined at the hip. They are the original Odd Couple...
"(Belief is governed by emotion, perception and peer pressure.)"
Interesting tagline for a person of faith ...
They're all banned. One on that list left voluntarily; the others ran afoul of this or that Mod.
Did you go looking for that, or did you just bump into it?
The rest of it goes like this: ...for people who never consider cross-checking the data, questioning the answers and drawing their own conclusions.
I glad you see my point.
Fun bags just got more fun.
H. pylori as a cause of peptic ulcer disease is another case of an idea that was vehemently rejected, ridiculed, and eventually triumphant and accepted. All the nitwits who think the scientific community is holding ID down are living in fantasy land.
All it takes to overthrow conventional science is a better idea backed by evidence. It's really up to the people with the new idea to provide the evidence, or at least commit themselves to what they expect to find.
There was a Japanese theoretical physicist who through pure mathematics predicted a new particle that had never been seen. He submitted his paper and was thoroughly ridiculed. For years he was relegated to the backwaters for his theory and toiled in obscurity.
19 years later someone captured the image in a cloud chamber of a particle that matched his predictions precisely and the sub-meson was "discovered". He was then awarded the Nobel prize.
The problem with ID, as I'm sure you well know, is that by its very definition it is incapable of ever being verified or refuted. Thus it is utterly outside the realm of science and will always remain so.
Well, a serious examination of my statement answers your question, if you think about it.
I shall elaborate by hauling out a definition for "device" - noun. a deliberately made thing, artifact, tool, engine, or machine created by design to fulfill at least one specific purpose through at least one planned mode of operation.
It seems Creationists and IDiots would call a baby a "device" - but I would not.
2.a. you assume that measuring the physics and chemistry fails to measure the feeling. I do not.
There a lot of different feelings and activities that can trigger the same neurochemical response. Frivolous fun and relaxing study of philosophy can pump in equal amounts of endorphins just as worry, fear, and anxiety can trigger equal amounts of reduction of serotonin re-uptake.
Then you have people who are good at hiding their feelings to the point where it would significantly alter neurochemical readings from a normal response range.
Then you have people whose neurochemistry (like mine) is deformed from birth and also significantly alters the results from normal. It's endless.
All you can really tell from measuring neurochemistry changes is changes in neurochemistry. The quality and nature and even quantity of these feelings cannot be revealed by the results since there are endless ways to deliberately or inadvertently or even congenitally mask them. So, again, what is a unit of fun as opposed to, say, a unit of serenity? How do you tell one from the other from reading endorphin levels?
actually, I oversimplified. My apologies. I should have stated: "I refer you to neurochemistry, neurophysiology, biochemistry, biomechanics, biofeedback, electroencephalography, magnetic resonance imagery, real-time positron emission tomography, etc... and counsel you to be patient: the mind is complex and the technology is nascent - the former shall be plumbed by the latter in the fullness of time."
happy, now?
2.b. spirit? we were discussing material LIFE, were we not?
This is the point where we part ways and makes my point. Your view of what life is is purely material, mine is of a spiritual nature. I mean that not condescendingly or in any other arrogant or obnoxious way, so I hope you don't take offense. But it just shows the difference in what we're talking about and how we're apparently talking past each other. You see living beings, humans included, as just machines or matter no different at their core than the atoms they are made of; I see them as inanimate matter animated by an eternal soul that is irreducible.
Yes: we do part ways when you insist on dragging in concepts for which there is no positive evidence. I don't take offense, but caution you to consider that much of what was formerly considered evidence of the soul has been conclusively demonstrated to be characteristics of the material brain, that such things as NDEs and OBEs seem vulnerable to scientific disproof (GLOC), that supernatural dread overtones can be induced by applying strong magnetic fields to the observer, that certain types of cellular and structural brain damage are known to induce "religious" or apotheotic hallucinations, etc...
So, again - offer positive evidence, or please stick to the subject - which was, and remains, material life.
3. Ah, but you fail to take into account that what one might call art, another might call crap; what one might call porn, andother might call art. We are trying for something a *little* more concrete than such "instinctual" rubbish.
Actually I did take that into account...
This does not appear to be the case, actually.
For the record, "art" has a very clear meaning, one it has held quite stably for 2500 years: "skill". It is entirely possible to objectively and concretely evaluate works of art on that basis. Many people might disagree. That matters not at all: they are simply incorrect.
Pornography, on the other hand, cannot be concretely defined, as it relies at least as much on the subjective reaction of the viewer as it does on the intent and craft of its producer. While explicit XXX porn is rather difficult to confuse with anything else, much that is NOT explicit is considered and reacted to as pornographic by some and not by others.
while none of this has any bearing on life itself, it does point up the risk one takes in assuming that one's "instinctual" recognition of life has any relation to anyone else's, let alone any scientific validity.
4. Again, we were discussing material LIFE, are we not? Changing the game and moving the goalposts like that just ain't cricket.
This would be to say that I already agreed with your point before the debate even begins. My point from the beginning has been that life is NOT a strictly material affair. I'm not sure how you could have missed that; if you did, what did you think was the subject of our debate?
see answer to 2.b.
it just jugged my attention when it bounced into view on the current thread sidebar.
and now, Top Hundred Hit Lists shall be -ah!er...- supplemented with Top-Heavy ___ Lists.
I leave it to your jugement to install the appropriate filling in the blank as you see fit ;)
Wow. What a stunning rebuttal to the points made in the article.
time for a "genetic fallacy" placemarker?
Speak for yourself. I voted for the other guy.
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