Posted on 12/05/2005 4:06:56 AM PST by PatrickHenry
The leaders of the intelligent design movement are once again holding court in America, defending themselves against charges that ID is not science. One of the expert witnesses is Michael Behe, author of the ID movement’s seminal volume Darwin’s Black Box. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, testified about the scientific character of ID in Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, the court case of eight families suing the school district and the school board in Dover, Pa., for mandating the teaching of intelligent design.
Under cross-examination, Behe made many interesting comparisons between ID and the big-bang theory — both concepts carry lots of ideological freight. When the big-bang theory was first proposed in the 1920s, many people made hostile objections to its apparent “supernatural” character. The moment of the big bang looked a lot like the Judeo-Christian creation story, and scientists from Quaker Sir Arthur Eddington to gung-ho atheist Fred Hoyle resisted accepting it.
In his testimony, Behe stated — correctly — that at the current moment, “we have no explanation for the big bang.” And, ultimately it may prove to be “beyond scientific explanation,” he said. The analogy is obvious: “I put intelligent design in the same category,” he argued.
This comparison is quite interesting. Both ID and the big-bang theory point beyond themselves to something that may very well lie outside of the natural sciences, as they are understood today. Certainly nobody has produced a simple model for the big–bang theory that fits comfortably within the natural sciences, and there are reasons to suppose we never will.
In the same way, ID points to something that lies beyond the natural sciences — an intelligent designer capable of orchestrating the appearance of complex structures that cannot have evolved from simpler ones. “Does this claim not resemble those made by the proponents of the big bang?” Behe asked.
However, this analogy breaks down when you look at the historical period between George Lemaitre’s first proposal of the big-bang theory in 1927 and the scientific community’s widespread acceptance of the theory in 1965, when scientists empirically confirmed one of the big bang’s predictions.
If we continue with Behe’s analogy, we might expect that the decades before 1965 would have seen big-bang proponents scolding their critics for ideological blindness, of having narrow, limited and inadequate concepts of science. Popular books would have appeared announcing the big-bang theory as a new paradigm, and efforts would have been made to get it into high school astronomy textbooks.
However, none of these things happened. In the decades before the big-bang theory achieved its widespread acceptance in the scientific community its proponents were not campaigning for public acceptance of the theory. They were developing the scientific foundations of theory, and many of them were quite tentative about their endorsements of the theory, awaiting confirmation.
Physicist George Gamow worked out a remarkable empirical prediction for the theory: If the big bang is true, he calculated, the universe should be bathed in a certain type of radiation, which might possibly be detectable. Another physicist, Robert Dicke, started working on a detector at Princeton University to measure this radiation. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson ended up discovering the radiation by accident at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1965, after which just about everyone accepted the big bang as the correct theory.
Unfortunately, the proponents of ID aren’t operating this way. Instead of doing science, they are writing popular books and op-eds. As a result, ID remains theoretically in the same scientific place it was when Phillip Johnson wrote Darwin on Trial — little more than a roster of evolutionary theory’s weakest links.
| When Behe was asked to explicate the science of ID, he simply listed a number of things that were complex and not adequately explained by evolution. These structures, he said, were intelligently designed. Then, under cross-examination, he said that the explanation for these structures was “intelligent activity.” He added that ID “explains” things that appear to be intelligently designed as having resulted from intelligent activity. |
Behe denied that this reasoning was tautological and compared the discernment of intelligently designed structures to observing the Sphinx in Egypt and concluding that it could not have been produced by non-intelligent causes. This is a winsome analogy with a lot of intuitive resonance, but it is hardly comparable to Gamow’s carefully derived prediction that the big bang would have bathed the universe in microwave radiation with a temperature signature of 3 degrees Kelvin.
After more than a decade of listening to ID proponents claim that ID is good science, don’t we deserve better than this?
"But you just happen to know a large selection of standard creationist mantras yet appear blithely unaware of the equally stock mainstream science refutations"
And the science refutations are weak. BTW, my education is in physical science.
Yea, well, imagine away, that's what makes for good science fiction, however, before we blame the cambrian explosion on the rigelian lizard people, we should look into less surprising natural explanations, such as the lack of calcium saturation in sea water before the mountains heaved out of the water to be leached by erosion. No calcium, no bones or shells; no bones or shells, no great abundance of fossils.
Also, as I recall, either Watson or Crick believed that DNA did not evolve on Earth, but came from elsewhere
Watson, as I remember, who was willing to share quite a few um...speculative theories in his later years. There are a lot of avenues of potential explanation here on earth to exhaust before we can manage to look meaningfully outside earth for explanations.
Also, there's something fundamentally scientifically disfunctional about this--it doesn't really give much of a satisfactory answer, if true. We are still left wondering what the actual mechanisms that brought life to be are; panspermia is a more naturalistic explanation than the goddidit form of ID, but neither answer quells the curiosity bump to any great extent.
Contrary to the expectations of creationists, and the stealth creationists of ID, if ID turns out to hold scientific water, it isn't much more than a small detour for evolutionary theory, and we've had plenty of those already, and evolutionary theory survived them all. There are vividly tangible, incredibly persuasive, massive mountains of highly detailed evidence of the slow grinding process of evolution on biological populations, with a backlog of unexplained, tantalizing enigmas that curious biologists in droves become so enamored with as to dedicate their lives to persuing--and just about none of them will evaporate if ID becomes part of science. The ID game isn't remotely worth the prize its proponents are hoping for, even if they win.
So...I guess I have a piece of advice. I think you should abandon your implied argument that it is lack of imagination that makes scientists uninterested in ID. That's kind of rude, and such is not the case. Because it is an idea inherently lacking in detailed support, ID is shallow comic book brainfood: It lacks the imaginative understructure that makes ideas become satisfying grist for the center stone of the scientific mill. It is a sideshow whose outcome isn't very important to the scientific discussion, regardless of outcome.
(1) the cilium, (2) the bacterial flagellum with filament, hook and motor embedded in the membranes and cell wall and (3) the biochemistry of blood clotting in humans....Each of which which has been debunked. I guess honesty only goes so far in ID-land.
Well, if it has been debunked then you can't say it's unfalsifiable, can you?
Please point to any scientific article which delineates the actual, not hypthetical, merely conceivable, or logically possible, but ontologically possible, confirmed by experimental evidence, origin of the bacterial flagellum by purely Darwinian means, i.e., by numerous, successive, slight modifications.
Cordially,
No significant number of natural scientists agree with you. The vast majority of scientists, including physical scientists, when asked, will tell you that the best vetted, best supported by experiment and field study, most reliable theory in the natural sciences, at present, is evolutionary theory.
BTW, my education is in physical science.
...and so if follows, I presume, that you don't have a particularly educated opinion about the details of the arguments in favor of evolutionary theory.
Doing so wouldn't falsify ID. It would just falsify a particular claim made be some ID proponents, which is that the BF could not have evolved.
Why do you set the bar so high for this particular disproof? Why is a hypothetical path not sufficient to disprove the notion, since the essential contention of Behe is that no hypothetical path exists.
Why don't you post here the ways in which the scientific refutions of your assorted stock creationist claims are weak. Rather than just starting with the stock claims as if the refutations don't exist. Then we can discuss whether you are right or misunderstanding something.
I smell fish.
Because that's the game. If you can't reproduce it molecule for molecule in a lab experiment, it's ID. If you can reproduce it in a lab experiment, it was through an experiment designed by human intelligence, and therefore an example of ID. Everything is a proof of ID!
You have unwittingly described why ID is not falsifiable. It starts with the premise that there is no possible path to the flagellum by small steps. When a possible path is presented, suddenly the criterion is: no speculation; show us the actual path.
When the flagellum was first proposed as irreducible, it was found to be have subcomponents that actually exist in living bacteria. When this was pointed out, ID advocates came up with other excuses. The gaps are getting smaller, along with the god people insist on finding in them.
Please explain the notion of "mental defect" from an atheistic evolutionary perspective. The implication of dysfunction presumably entails that there is something 'wrong' with the noetic functioning, or that it is not functioning as it 'ought' to function. But the idea of something not functioning as it ought to function is only coherent if that something was designed for some purpose. Evolution, whether of brains or anything else is not by design; it knows nothing of "ought". So how then do you account for your notion of mental dysfunction or defect?
Cordially,
Darwin recognized the gaping hole in his theory - the absence of an earth teaming with transitional fossils. Gould and Dawkins admitted as much in my earlier post from last night.
Behe is a molecular biologist and sees everything from this prism. He has done a terrific job demonstrating the irreducible complexity at the molecular level. He doesn't explore the paleontological evidence which evolution lacks.
"shouting him down" was a metaphor. The number of scientists who disagree with evolution is a tiny fraction of the scientists in the world. The number of practicing biologists who disagree with the theory of evolution is a fraction of the tiny fraction. Kooks can be found to support any nonsense; 99% consensus rather than 100% consensus hardly indicates weakness of biology's unifying theory.
Just off the top of my head:
Anything from "Silent Spring" except the page numbers.
The next ice age is upon us (my favorite from 1975).
Second hand smoke will kill you at 20 paces.
Alar will kill you even if you just look at it.
Salt doesn't cause high blood pressure.
Global warming is caused by humans.
Global warming is causing an ice age.
Global warming causes more storms.
I'd be willing to be proved wrong on any of the above but from everything I've read on any of the above the "facts" were generated to fit the agenda. I didn't hear anyone in the scientific community say bravo sierra or, actually some did, they were just very few and far between and certainly a minority.
Perhaps you know a better class of scientists; all those I know are so worried about funding and being accepted by their peers (humm, the SCOTUS model comes to mind) that they wouldn't open their mouth if their peers decided the world was flat.
"Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever."
--Robert Nozick
"During the 1880s, Charles Peirce began to develop a system of 'scientific metaphysics', an evolutionary cosmology that explains the evolution to a law-governed external world from a state of pure possibility. This appeals to his 'tychism', the view that there is absolute chance, and provides a defence of his realism."
--Oxford Scholarship Online
Which must be why he doesn't find any significant support within science, even within his own university. Others have demonstrated that the BF is not IC at all as Behe originally defined IC. The IDists don't even seem to be able to provide a clear explanation of what IC or Specified Complexity is, let alone be able to explain how they know it when they see it.
He doesn't explore the paleontological evidence which evolution lacks.
I'm not quite clear. Do you agree with Behe's conclusions about evolution, common descent, and the age of the earth or not. Be aware, much of the most powerful smoking-gun evidence recently discovered that shows evolution to be true is molecular, and well within Behe's field of comprehension.
Perhaps what FR needs is a kill file feature (grin).
I wish you well my FRiend and patience for both of us as I can use my share as well.
Perhaps you are joking. Neither of those things sound like anything to do with the theory of evolution, and neither of them sound like something that would be taught to high-schoolers.
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