Professor [Behe]: Design not creationism [Evolution trial, 18 October]

The York Dispatch ^ | 18 October 2005 | CHRISTINA KAUFFMAN

[MineralMan]

"How many times do I have to say that ID seriously questions the merits of evolution because life at exists today simply cannot be the result of random chance."

---

You can say it as many times as you wish. It has not been demonstrated to be so. Behe's conjectures do not make it so. The Bible does not make it so.

Behe's conjectures have been roundly discredited. That you do not know that does not mean that it is not so.

[longshadow]

If I've told you guys once, I've told you 1⁷²⁰ times: DON'T FEED THE GOON-SQUAD TROLLS!

[dmz]

Why, yes, yes it does. The defendant is on trial, not the plaintiff.

[PatrickHenry]

DON'T FEED THE GOON-SQUAD TROLLS!

But ... but ... why are there still monkeys?
</troll mode>

[WildHorseCrash]

Behe is hardly a psuedo-science charlatan. If you are placing your faith in an attorney against a well-prepared and intelligent expert witness, you are exercising faith.

Depends on the attorney. A good one will take the most well-prepared and intelligent expert witness and cut his throat, and the witness won't even know it. In fact, in my experience, the smarter the witness, the more susceptible he is to falling victim to the attorney.

[MineralMan]

"DON'T FEED THE GOON-SQUAD TROLLS!"

Very difficult to feed trolls. According to trusted sources, trolls became extinct 173 BCE. The last troll lived near Trondheim, Norway, under a low bridge, and was killed by Ole Svenson, who used a cudgel to break its neck. He then made a drinking cup of its skull and enjoyed drinking mead from it until he died of old age. The skull was lost, but may have been transported to the USA in an immigrant's chest sometime in the 1950s. I am searching for it now.

[newguy357]

Have you got a supernatural designer in your back pocket or are you just making this up?

Are you philosophically retarded or are you just playing stupid?

[connectthedots]

I did say a well prepared expert witness.

[WildHorseCrash]

Evolution is on trial here. Anyone who claims otherwise is naive.

Evolution is not on trial here. Anyone who claims otherwise lacks the understanding of what precise legal issue is before the court. The question is whether the ID-announcement rule is an establishement of religion. It either is or it is not. That fact is simply not dependant on the fact of whether evolution is true or not. It must either be or not be an establishment based on its own merits.

[PatrickHenry]

In fact, in my experience, the smarter the witness, the more susceptible he is to falling victim to the attorney.

The ACLU has slick attorneys. And there's an enormous body of material out there which makes Behe look silly. Example: Is It Science Yet? Intelligent Design Creationism & the Constitution, Washington Univ. Law Quarterly. (That's a 149-page pdf file, and it's dynamite.) Armed with that kind of material, a good trial lawyer can make Behe look like an idiot.

[js1138]

You ought to keep in mind that only one of the plaintiffs' witnesses claimed that evolution is a 'fact'

Ah, but the defense admits it is a fact.

My book concentrates entirely on Darwin's mechanism, and simply takes for granted common descent. Behe

[Liberal Classic]

Behe testified that intelligent designdoesn't require a supernatural creator, but an intelligent designer: it does not name the designer.

Somewhere, over the rainbow, the Raelians are cheering.

[newguy357]

Does not follow. Even if a "supernatural designer" existed outside of *our* space-time system, you have not demonstrated that it would necessarily be free from causality in its *own* realm, or that that realm would have no time of its own, etc.

There is no way to prove it one way or another because we've already agreed to the fact that any hypothetical system outside our space-time is independent of our domain. Time is a known feature of ours. Why every other? An existential proof does not imply universality. Particularly, why should a hypothetical being existing outside of our domain be bound by the rules that it invented for ours? If you and I were splotches on a two-dimensional canvas that may or may not have occurred naturally--you would shake your fist at the designer insisting that he also must be bound to our two-dimensional domain.

For example, if advances in physics one day allow us to create a new Universe ourselves (parallel to our own), that would, by your definition, make us "supernatural designers" with respect to the new Universe, yet that would hardly therefore mean that we "need no beginning", as you incorrectly conclude.

I made no assertion that such a conclusion follows invariably. My only suggestion was the possibility that a designer existing outside one's physical domain is not necessarily bound by the laws of said physical domain. You are taking my existential and trying to make it a universal. THAT does not follow.

[js1138]

Now Behe is showing us where his curriculum would begin.

You mean all the kids would be issued Barbie and Ken dolls that say "Science is so hard"?

[Right Wing Professor]

Miller has done a nice job of outsmarting Behe over the years. He got Behe to admit the blood clotting cascade was not IC.

To set the record straight: The second and more important point is that, while the paper is very interesting, it doesn't address irreducible complexity. Either Miller hasn't read what I said in my book about metabolic pathways, or he is deliberately ignoring it. I clearly stated in Darwin's Black Box metabolic pathways are not irreducibly complex (Behe 1996) (pp. 141-142; 150-151), because components can be gradually added to a previous pathway. Thus metabolic pathways simply aren't in the same category as the blood clotting cascade or the bacterial flagellum.

Underlines mine

You appear to be under the misapprehension that the blood clotting cascade is a metabolic pathway, or suffering under some other confusion.

[b_sharp]

"How many times do I have to say that ID seriously questions the merits of evolution because life at exists today simply cannot be the result of random chance. If not random chance, some other force must be behind the design of life as it exists.

We understand and believe you...except, and this is a big one, the effort behind the insertion of ID into the education system is claiming that ID has nothing to do with the supernatural. However if you separate the possible causes in two camps, those that occur naturally such as evolution and those that do not occur naturally the natural causes can be rendered down to non-intelligent designers. This leaves only the non-natural causes. (Remember we are dealing with something that can directly manipulate features on Earth organisms, poke around in DNA sequences and the like)

If you posit aliens as non-natural causes as ID is wont to do, then the options for their existence are - they were created by natural processes, they were created by non-natural causes or they created themselves.

We can dismiss the first point out of hand because that is what ID is trying to disprove. The second point just brings us back to the same question - how were the aliens that created the aliens that created us created? Eventually you have to stop the circle of aliens creating aliens and move on to something that created itself. (You can't use the argument that they have always existed because that could also be applied to natural causes). If some alien race was able to create itself, I would say they have pretty much the same capabilities as the supernatural supposedly does. All in all it looks like ID can be boiled down to supernatural causes.

[newguy357]

Behe is claiming an intelligent designer does NOT have to be supernatural. Your argument is standard creationist fare -- it appeals to a supernatural agent. So who designed Behe's designer? Even you admit it must be a supernatural agent. Therefore ID is really creationism and not science.

In the physical, scientific search for our origins we only have the data set found on earth. ID people argue that this particular data set shows evidence of intelligent design. There could, theoretically, exist data showing otherwise at some other location.

[furball4paws]

It's always been a miracle to me that the art police don't come and tear thos ethings down and burn 'em.

[WildHorseCrash]

I did say a well prepared expert witness.

I don't care how well-prepared he is. The attorney, if he's good, will not only assume the witness is prepared, but plan on it. But, at the end of the day, he's a layperson and will fall into layperson traps. They all do.

[PatrickHenry]

All in all it looks like ID can be boiled down to supernatural causes.

But ... but ... it's science! It's gotta be science! It's science!!!! [Scream, rant, pound table, sob, faint]