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.
You seem obsessed with the distinction, which is only blurred by creationists.
I suggest that you take it up with them - they're the ones you should have a beef with.
First post read for the day. Rather than chewing the fat and looking like a boob for the rest of the day I'll just pack it in and sleep on it for a stretch.
Yah, I love double intenders (As Nanny Og would say)
Addicted I say, addicted.
yeah, you should get some rack-time before attempting to milk this one any further ;)
I suppose you would not, because you see everything, humans included, as an accident, which would automatically preclude the possibility of ANYTHING qualifying as a device because devices are, in your words, created for a specific purpose. Accidents by definition have no purpose. Fruit of the accident tree and all...
But do you have any evidence that any Creationist or "IDiot" has ever called or thought of a baby as a "device"?
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?
Indeed I am, because this last sentence shows that you are a man of faith. You accept on faith that science will be able to answer my question -- how do you tell by reading endorphin levels (and by extension all of the nascent technology you mention above) whether someone is having fun or feeling serene or has received some mild good news or is getting a 'false' feeling triggered by congenital or medical issues, etc., etc., etc., but for the time being you at least admit that though there is as yet no way to do this, you have faith that there will be.
Naturally at this point you will pooh-pooh the whole idea that you are operating on faith by saying you base this assumption on evidence of science unlocking mysteries of the past leads you to believe that it will unlock all future mysteries. (The implication of course being that all non-atheists have no evidence of their own and we are just willfully ignorant, even stupid people who have arbitrarily decided to believe something we know on some level is false out of fear of facing the "truth".)
This is faith too, an a priori assumption that there is nothing beyond the material world after using purely physical means to measure that which by definition is not physical, and finding nothing, saying this is proof that there is no God. This is much like using a ruler to measure the pH balance of water in a pool. 'See? The pH balance is zero inches long so this whole pH balance thing is a hoax born of wishful thinking!' Only spirit can measure spirit.
But we have our own bodies of evidence to work with, not only the Bible (or whatever holy book), but things God has done for us individually in the past that defy scientific explanation. Disappearance of tumors, things like that.
Yes: we do part ways when you insist on dragging in concepts for which there is no positive evidence.
No positive physical evidence that you know of, that is. Put that ruler down.
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...
First, pardon my ignorance -- I know what NDE is but not OBE or GLOC. Help me out here...
Second, proving that people hallucinate is meaningless. The implication here seems to be that because I believe people can and do have encounters with the Divine, I must by force of logic have to also believe that people never hallucinate. Of course people hallucinate -- and for all kinds of reasons even beyond those that you give above. But that's hardly proof that there is no such thing as an eternal soul. By this standard, should anyone have a hallucination that they are in Las Vegas, that would suffice as proof or at least strong evidence that Las Vegas is a mythical place.
Third, what you are offering up is a little far-fetched. How plausible is it that everyone who ever had a "religious" or "apotheotic" experience that otherwise baffles skeptics must have either been in the presence of a strong magnetic field or had some sort of brain damage?
So, again - offer positive evidence, or please stick to the subject - which was, and remains, material life.
I'm sorry but not only are you are asking me to measure the pool's pH balance with a ruler, you are saying that in order to have a fair debate, I must agree with your premise in advance before you can then prove to me in a public debate that your premise is valid and mine, which I already abandoned in advance, is not. You are asking me to join a secular choir for you to preach to rather than seeking to convert me fair and square.
But for a moment I'll play the game. Fine, there is only material life. So I have to ask again, what exactly are we debating?
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.
Skill? People have skill at scrubbing toilets, welding iron, mowing lawns, efficiently processing paperwork and diagnosing diseases. People have skill in every human endeavor or act. Is every human endeavor or act art?
Your definition of art appears to be you can tell if it's art or not by how good or bad it is. This is a circular argument that confuses the evaluation of art with art itself, that assumes in advance that what you are looking at, listening to, or otherwise experiencing is art before deciding whether or not it's art. This is like saying you can tell if an animal is a bird or not by the beauty of its feathers.
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.
Again you make my point for me in how difficult pornography is to define and yet, as I said before, most of the time we know it when we see it. That people misconstrue intent the rest of the time is irrelevant. Rocks or fallen trees in a meadow can accidentally form images that look pornographic. That someone construes an accident of nature as deliberately placed that way by someone doesn't mean there is no such thing as intent or pornography, or that we can't most of the time know it when we see it. I go back to my previous analogy about the snake in the woods. I can be fooled into thinking a discarded hose is a snake but, I repeat, that doesn't mean that most of the time I won't know a snake when I see one.
While none of this has any bearing on life itself...
It very much does, although I admit it does so on a bit of a tangential level. Explanation below.
...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.
And that is the danger of a purely scientific approach to everything as if physical science is all there is: a descent into a hidebound, cannibalistic epistemology that carried to its logical conclusion says that if we don't know everything then clearly we don't know anything, that anything we can't explain top-to-bottom via science simply doesn't exist. You or I may not exist, first because this debate may be just going on in your head or mine -- who's to say? Or that we may just be characters in a dream in someone else's head. Or is there even such a thing as a head to have dreams in? Is there such a thing as a self, or is that just another illusion cast by the cold determinism of atoms and dust just doing what atoms and dust do? Or is there even such a thing as atoms and dust? What do those terms really mean? What does "term" mean? What does "mean" mean? What is "what"? Who's to say?
It's a good thing animals don't operate this way or they -- and we -- would all be dead or would never have come into existence to begin with. But animals don't need a scientific explanation to know certain things and neither do we.
Just as a deer would be 'baffled' by someone giving it a scientific explanation of its need for water, we would be equally deaf to attempts by an otherwordly being giving an exhaustive spiritual explanation our need to attend to matters of the spirit. But the deer would not demand proof of its need for water before it took another drink, nor would it refuse to ever drink water again if it once ran across something that appeared to be water but wasn't. Neither should we be convinced that there is no eternal soul because magnets or drugs or brain defects or psychological trauma cause people to hallucinate, any more than we should be convinced there is no such thing as money by a counterfeit $20 bill.
The history of humanity shows an endless, relentless pursuit of the metaphysical (or in a word, God) triggered in part by an equally endless, relentless state of extreme dissatisfaction with the state of the world that you don't find in any other animal, as if we are all royalty exiled from our homeland like the Polish government in England during WW2. We know this world isn't as it "should" be. But where does this 'should' come from? How do we know this is so? You call this 'should' ignorance; I call it a homing device.
If I am right, there is beauty and joy in store for us infinities beyond the capacity of our woefully finite minds to imagine.
But if you are right, then humanity is doomed and was from the beginning, born with the fatal defect of this false instinct, and the final countdown begins the moment we realize on a mass level that this instinct really is false and that therefore everything is meaningless.
Fallacy of Proving the Negative. There is no such thing as an "a priori assumption". Can't prove there is no God because one can't Prove a Negative. You know nothing of logic or the thinking process, "evidently".
Provide "one iota" of evidence of the existence of a higher being.
therefore everything is meaningless
Non-sequitur. Only for you. Not for a rational being.
Good Grief, I never saw such a long-winded attempt to present this particular argument. Science is about "physical evidence that we know of", however limiting one finds that. Whether ID is right or wrong is irrelevant, it is that distinction between positive physical evidence at hand and utterly speculative metaphysics that makes ID not-science.
If we treated loosy-goosey speculation about what is happening where the evidence is slack, and the potential explanations are infinite in number, as if it stood on par with well-established, well-vetted corners of the scientific endeavor, we might as well fold up the civilization shop and go back to digging up earthworms and grubs for a living.
As far as science is concerned, You could be right about God the Prime Mover, faith-healing, and personal revelation--but that doesn't remotely make you scientific, and it specifically doesn't give you the right to mis-represent what scientists think is science in a classroom.
No matter the strength of your faith, if you haven't provided positive forensic evidence, and done the extensive homework required to make that evidence compelling in the scientific forums (which is the standard by which science is measured, by adult scientists), to the average scientist, what's going in in Dover makes you look like heedless children trying to grab the steering wheel of a moving vehicle. Perhaps especially so when you use tons of high-sounding, verbiage to distract yourself from noticing what asonishingly insulting, irresponsible behavior this is viewed as, when you aren't preaching to the choir.
I think you like totally misunderstand. As for as the rest of your post, it was sort of like, you know, not understandable.
How true. That is the problem with this ID movement.
By observation, most people have, at most, a tepid interest in metaphysics, unless put to the spur endlessly by a priest class that profits handsomely from the obsession, and thereby earns for metaphysics an unduly magnified place in the history books. I would venture to guess that the average Mesopotamian citizen would have gladly ditched metaphysics in a quick second, if they could have ditched their God-Kings along with.
(or in a word, God) triggered in part by an equally endless, relentless state of extreme dissatisfaction with the state of the world that you don't find in any other animal
I would suggest to you that most of the animals on this planet, could they voice an opinion, would agree with Hobbes assessment: that life is nasty, brutal and short.
Cite a scientist who has suggested that "a purely scientific approach to everything...is all there is". What rude claptrap.
Are the transitions from one step to the next in Matzke's model reasonably probable? Does each step in his model constitute only a "slight modification" (sensu Darwin)? There's no way to tell because the model is not sufficiently detailed. As I pointed out earlier, all we have in hand is the modern type III secretion system, the modern bacterial flagellum, and various homologous biochemical structures embedded in the flagellum present in extant organisms. We don't have the intermediates that Matzke posits nor the ancestral type III secretion system. We don't know what they look like. We don't have their precise biochemical specification. We don't know if the intermediate systems that Matzke's model hypothesizes would work. We have no way of determining how easy or hard it is for the Darwinian mechanism to bridge the steps in Matzke's model. Matzke, throughout his article, invokes gene duplications and mutations at key points where the Darwinian mechanism is supposed to effect transitions that are reasonably probable. But what gene exactly is being duplicated? And what locus on a gene is being mutated? Matzke never says. Indeed, his model is so unspecific that he cannot answer these questions. But unless we know the answer to such questions, there's no way to know whether the transitions Matzke describes are reasonably probable and therefore of the type required by Darwin's theory.
Matzke claimed that his model for the Darwinian evolution of the bacterial flagellum is detailed, step-by-step, and testable. Let consider these in turn. Is Matzke's model detailed? Hardly. Lynn Margulis's criticism of neo-Darwinism applies all too well to Matzke's model: "Like a sugary snack that temporarily satisfies our appetite but deprives us of more nutritious foods, neo-Darwinism sates intellectual curiosity with abstractions bereft of actual details -- whether metabolic, biochemical, ecological, or of natural history." (Quoted from Acquiring Genomes, p. 103.) Matzke gestures at the types of systems that the Darwinian mechanism would need to produce if it is to evolve the bacterial flagellum. But these systems as well as the changes they must undergo are left unspecified, and we have at this time no way to determine to what degree, if at all, they could be instantiated in biological reality. As for Matzke's claim that his model is step-by-step, that's trivially true -- after all, he defined the model as a series of steps. But are those steps reasonably small so that they constitute what Darwin called "successive, slight modifications." My sense is no -- getting from a type III secretion system to a bacterial flagellum in six steps seems on its face to require at least one big leap somewhere. But intuitions aside, given that Matzke's model is not detailed, there's no way to decide whether the steps are small enough to be accommodated by the Darwinian mechanism.
That leaves testability. What are we to make of the repeated claim throughout Matzke's article that his model is testable? In claiming that his model is testable, Matzke confuses a precondition for his model with actual evidence for it. Fully two thirds of the 20 pages Matzke devotes to his model are concerned with establishing homologues for structures embedded in the bacterial flagellum. In several cases the homologues are completely absent. Thus, according to Matzke, his model is testable because if the homologues are found, they would confirm his model. But this argument evinces a deep confusion. If the homologues never existed in nature, then the systems that needed to be co-opted for the evolution of the flagellum never existed either, and so the flagellum could not have evolved in Darwinian fashion. In other words, if the homologues never existed, Matzke's model is dead in the water. Matzke's model therefore presupposes the existence of these homologues. They are a precondition for the model, and any evaluation of the model's adequacy proceeds on the assumption of those homologues. That's why I was willing earlier to grant their existence. To actually test Matzke's model requires being able to evaluate the likelihood of transitioning from one step in the model to the next. Because the systems at these various steps are in fact unspecified (they are hypothetical; they do not, as far as we know, currently exist in nature; they are not available in any laboratory; and researchers for now have no experimental procedures for generating them in the laboratory), there is no way to carry out this evaluation. It follows that Matzke's model is in fact untestable.
According to Dembski, "Matzke's day job is as a geography graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara". Not that that matters to me, it's only a question of whether his analysis is sound, but if he was making a pro-ID argument I'm guessing you would be pointing that out.
Two years ago cell biologist Franklin Harold published a book with Oxford University Press titled The Way of the Cell. In it he explicitly repudiated intelligent design: "We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity." And yet he continued, "But we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." (p. 205) Is Harold, a noted cell biologist, right? Or has Matzke, a geography graduate student, disproven Harold? To be sure, stranger things have happened. But Matzke is not in the same league as the mathematician Galois, who at a tender age resolved outstanding mathematical problems that had lain open for millennia. Matzke's model, far from resolving the evolutionary origin of the bacterial flagellum and despite his protestations to the contrary, is yet another exercise in Darwinian storytelling. In this regard I commend him, because he has told the best Darwinian story to date concerning the evolutionary origin of the bacterial flagellum.
What do you regard as the refutations of the clotting cascade and the mousetrap analogy?
Science is about finding mechanisms, not meaning. Processes, not purpose.
Dembski's moving the goalposts. The concept of irreducible complexity requires there be no stepwise pathway for a system to evolve. This can be refuted by postulating a reasonable pathway. Whether or not that pathway is the actual pathway and whether there is evidence for it is a separate issue. That no one knows how flagella evolved is a weaker claim than the claim that there is no stepwise pathway by which they could have evolved - it is, in fact, just the hackneyed argument that because evolution has not yet filled in all the gaps, evolution remains conjectural.
As Dembski tacitly acknowledges, TTSS refutes the IC flagellum as originally formulated; there is a homologous functional subsystem of the flagellum. Now he's claiming the TTSS is IC! It reminds me of the old joke about transitional fossils
Creatrionist: there are no trnasitional fossils between whales and land animals
Evolution: yes, there are, here's Rhodocetus.
Creationist: now there are two gaps, between land animals and Rhodocetus, and between Rhodocetus and modern whales! Your case has gotten even weaker!
As for Dembski's ad hominem, if, like Dembski, I didn't have a Ph.D. in the sciences or a single peer-reviewed scientific publication, if I'd been kicked out of Baylor and were teaching at a Baptist seminary, I'd be awfully careful about questioning other people's qualifications.
I guess we continue to talk past each other. I made the point over and over that I wasn't dealing strictly with physical science, but with philosophy as well and how the two are inextricably linked, even though they are very different fields that (here I agree with you completely), are not to be mixed or confused with one another. But their link is undeniable.
If I were a scientist by profession, I agree that I would have to think and act as you think and act in this discussion. Purely physical evidence, that's all we've got because that's all that science deals with.
If that's all you're saying, fair enough. If you're saying that the scientist's credo should be applied very strictly in all aspects of life and not just within the scientific profession, then we clearly will not agree anytime soon.
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