Posted on 11/05/2005 11:47:03 AM PST by Lurking Libertarian
The Case of Behe vs. Darwin An unassuming biochemist who became the lead witness for intelligent design is unfazed by criticism but glad he has tenure.
By Josh Getlin, Times Staff Writer
HARRISBURG, Pa. — As he took the witness stand in a packed courtroom, ready to dissect Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, biochemist Michael J. Behe looked confident and relaxed. Then he learned what it felt like to be under a microscope.
Isn't it true, an attorney asked, that Behe's critique of Darwin and support for intelligent design, a rival belief about the origins of life, have little scientific support?
Yes, Behe conceded.
Isn't it also true, the attorney pressed, that faculty members in Behe's department at Lehigh University have rejected his writings as unscientific?
Behe, a slight, balding man with a graying beard, grudgingly answered yes.
"Intelligent design is not the dominant view of the scientific community," he said. "But I'm pleased with the progress we are making."
After two grueling days on the stand, Behe looked drained. He was also unbowed. In a nationally watched trial that could determine whether intelligent design can be taught in a public school, the soft-spoken professor had bucked decades of established scientific thought.
Behe (pronounced BEE-hee), one of the nation's leading advocates of intelligent design, challenged Darwin's theory that life evolved through natural selection and a process of random variation. He argued that living organisms are so highly complex that an unseen, intelligent designer must have created them. That designer, he said, is God.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Behe has been rebutted in detail. The fact that you may have been holding your fingers in your ears and singing, "nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, I can't hear you," at the time doesn't change that.
There have been a few threads on this subject in the three years since you last posted - perhaps you would like to review them before continuing, lest you find yourself falling into old traps.
There have been numerous devates between the ID school and the Darwinists. The problem is that the Darwinists have not debated homorably in most of those that I have witnessed. I'm sure the issue is format, which has consistently favored the evasive tactics of the Darwinists.
I'm sure that being under oath favors mainstream biology. Perhaps that's unfair.
Thanks for the ping!
This isn't unlikely at all. Different numbers of chromosomes have been found in DNA extracted from Neanderthals. If Neanderthals -- which we know were a specific breeding community -- had that much variation, why couldn't others in the human family tree?
That's patently absurd. The Darwinists evade the key issues and answer the most problematic issues (such as irreducible complexity) with sleight of hand. It is the Darwinists who interject the "anything is possible in time" gambit when faced with the statistically improbable. A good example was one such rebuttal which can best be characterized as saying that irreducible complexity can be overcome because it must have been, given that we "know" that species have evolved. these sorts of juvelnile circular arguments are the best that the Darwinists, like a religious cult whose founder has been proven a fraud, can muster as they scramble for higher ground against the rising tide of real science.
The fact is that Darwinism as such was actually killed in the crib with the advent of genetic science. the problem is that adherence to Dawinian macroevolution had become so dogmatic that "scientists" were willing to go to absurd extremes to conceal the deficiencies of Darwin's quaint little theory. It was a nice piece of cognition for the 19th century, but would scarcely have survived this long had the objectivity of the Age of Enlightenment not given way to cheerleading and pop science masquerading as the real deal.
Actually not all humans have the same number of chrosomes. It's true that the most common variances are associated with retardation, not anomolies prevent reproduction.
Great thoughts kjvail. Peace to you, man.
Oath? Dude, don't you understand "theory"? Oath has nothing to do with anything except for childish grandstanding when debating theory. It's like placing an astrophysicist under oath the determine what is at the core of the sun. Unless and until someone has been there and has personal knowledge of the core of the sun, oath means nothing. The reason the Theory of Evolution is called the Theory of Evolution is that it was and is a THEORY. It is (at best) informed speculation ragarding the processes behind witnessed (or imagined) outcomes. No man has witnessed the process of macroevolution, and so there would be no more point placing one debating the points of the theory under oath than there would be placing a modern historian under oath to discern the specific events of August 27, 1023 in a small village outside Monmouth.
How do you know this? Seriously. It may or may not be the case. I just wasn't aware that the experiment had been done (and published). Please elaborate. Individuals and even species with different chromosome arrangements CAN reproduce. Not always, of course, but sometimes. It's not determined simply by how the chromosomes are split up.
Your whole point that a chromosome level mutation automatically means that the chromosomes can't properly pair and match up during mitosis and meiosis is simply wrong. Some chromosomal mutations, such as centric fusions, can change chromosome numbers without even reducing (let alone eliminating) fertility at least in the heterozygous state.
In fact does anybody know if the number of centromeres -- or the number of chromosome "arms" -- actually differs in humans and apes?
Good grief! There are different number of chromosomes in MANY humans TODAY (such as in Downs or Klienfelter's syndromes). The issue is not whether differing numbers of chromosome pairs occur. It is whether it is possible to propagate an extrachromosomal or subchromosomal genotype and thereby create a new species.
Thank you for demonstrating that you in fact do not understand the topic.
See, what you are doing is reverting to the intellectually dishonest "anything's possible" gambit.
We do in fact know what sorts of variants can and cannot reproduce, which is why we do not have chimerae running around all over the place. You act as though the science of modern genetics doesn't have a century of research to determine what does and does not occur.
Oh, yeah. Who said that? And how do you get that this was the "best" the "Darwinians" could do? How is this better than showing, for instance, that there are species that are missing elements in the supposedly irreducibly complex human blood clotting cascade, and yet are still able to clot their own blood perfectly well?
Reading through the pro-Darwinist comments above, I will conclude my visit by expressing my amazement that all Darwinists are not religious fanatics, given that the incredible suspension of disbelief necessary to defend your dogma greatly exceeds that necessary to conceive of a supernatural Creator. The sad part is that you give "science" a bad name by claiming that the sophistry that seeks to avoid the inevitability of the utter debunking of your demostrably fatally flawed theory is based upon actual scientifically deduced fact. In fact, Evolutionism has as much to do with science as does Scientology.
So then, unlike most skeptics of evolution, you do NOT accept that the various members of the horse family (for instance) share a common ancestry by reproductive descent, since the species have wildly differing chromosome numbers?
You realize that this would make you an extremist and deviant even among the strictest creationists, who usually take offense if they are stereotyped as holding to the 18th-19th Century notion of fixed species?
I get that the comment was the best that Darwinists can come up with is by observing the nebulous denials here and even in more scholarly debates on the subject. I have scanned this thread for a single viable rebuttal of ID and yet see nothing but gainsaying and obfuscation. That's just sad.
G'night!
No, you misread me. I'm not merely saying it's "possible" that chromosome numbers can change without eliminating (and sometimes, if more rarely, without even reducing) fertility. I'm saying THAT IT ACTUALLY DOES HAPPEN, and that there are many observed examples of it happening.
Out, out, brief candle! ;)
So much for the Christian-basher's plausible deniability, eh? LOL!
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