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.
Horse feces ping!
My wife doesn't think she was Intelligently Designed. She tells me that every month.
(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
Furiously scribbling notes...
"My wife doesn't think she was Intelligently Designed"
Mine doesn't think I was! :)
Well, well; it seems Behe's Prized Canard (Irreducible Complexity) is a ruptured duck....
Good conservativs can agree to disagree on this issue. Of course, we will secretly believe a whole host of usavory things about those on the other side, but such is life I suppose.
So, we have to assume that the good professor who wrote this article is of the Darwinian mind given that he is in the evolution department.
I only last week, watched a video on intelligent design, not wanting to take it on it's face. I have always been skeptical about the theory of evolution.
I am no scientist, but I am not sure how one can make the leap to say that intelligent design is done, based soley on the biology of the secretory function of the bacterial flagellum. It does show that another function exists, but ID is a very new science in terms of discovery, and I think that it's sole purpose or functions are not yet known. I don't think we can dismiss it altogether just yet.
When you watch the function of the bacterial flagellum, it's make-up being much like a machine with independent parts of a whole, it is astounding that it would develop simply by evolutionary processes. Perhaps it did, but I have my doubts.
But were you staying at a Holiday Inn?
I don't get the criticism of Dr. Behe's acuity by conservatives. He is trying to illustrate scientifically that Darwinian theory is not the end all be all answer to the creation of life.
I am not saying that I totally agree with Dr. Behe, but I also think Darwin was a good man, just off target. Even Darwin himself admitted the possibility that discoveries may be made to negate his theory.
What does that mean?
That's actually not true. ID has been around for a very long time. It's a new name for an old, tired idea.
That's actually not true. ID has been around for a very long time. It's a new name for an old, tired idea.
So new that it doesn't have even one peer reviewed paper in the National Library of Medicine on the subject.
Now that's leading edge.
Maybe someday the Discovery Institute will hire some scientists to do actual research on ID, rather than hunt for ways to criticize evolution, and they'll publish a paper.
Waiting,.... Waiting .....
I think many here are using ID as a proxy for Genesis, which is silly, because of all the other creation myths out there which can claim ID as their own.
On the other hand, evolution is just plumb full of science except for the many empty holes in the chain. In those cases the hole is filled in with "theory".
Okay, but I still don't get why it seems to be dismissed as lunacy. How long has it been around exactly? Surely not as long as Darwinian theory.
I would think conservatives would be interested at least in hearing options other than evolution. I'm not saying that ID is fact, but I'm willing to hear other theories.
That ID video you watched probably gave you the sum total there is worth saying about ID, not counting the time spent on nonsense rhetoric and fallacies designed to distort and mislead. Put that up against the sum total of research supporting evolution - the vast mountains of confirmation supporting evolution - and then make an assessment. The evidence for evolution is more than the dozen pages of dumbed-down text that the average person might have vaguely paid attention to in HS sophomore bio class..
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