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?
You can't read contextually, can you. This was for HIGHER VERTEBRATES. Remember that? Guess not.
Nobody rebutted by asking "What about bacteria?" Yes, higher vertebrates, slow reproduction. So what?
The rebuttals were that 1) the "cost of substitution" is less than Haldane figured," 2) Haldane's model was not allowing for the massive parallelism of substitutions in nature, and 3) ReMine was using a bad model to rebut a hard fact.
This misbegotten effort by you to obfuscate your chalatan ways....is manifest.
My irony meter is staring to overheat.
And medved was the one always thumped on the Haldane Dilemma, not vice versa. Seems to me he did the same as you, misquoting.
I have to my own knowledge misquoted no one. I mentioned medved merely as a poster who often trotted out ReMine on these threads. You have no basis that I can see for announcing that he has misquoted ReMine. If anyone at all has misquoted ReMine, I don't see it.
You're acting like a cornered rat.
Vade,
Pardon me but I have never heard the term "furniture-chewing" before - what does it mean? I googled and all I could find was stuff about getting your dog to stop chewing the furniture.
Thanks
-LVD
Who doesn't love and admire actor Ben Kingsley and his riveting performances as Gandhi or Don Logan in Sexy Beast or Behrani in House of Sand and Fog? But now comes word that the actor born Krishna Banji insists on being called "Sir Ben" in social situations. (Sir Ben was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in the New Year's Eve Honors List of 2001). This year, Academy Awards voters reportedly aren't too impressed with Sir Ben's requirement. And the actor only seems to have dug himself deeper with this defense: "I think 'Sir Ben' is lovely. The word 'mister' has just disappeared for me. It's like, when you become a doctor after years of study. I suppose after years of chewing the furniture, I get the 'Sir' for being a thespian."http://www.bensherwood.com/weblog/2004_02_01_bensherwood_archive.html.
Now it is possible that someone who thinks like a crackpot may have hit on the truth, but is it really practical to tell the time with a stopped watch?
Let me get this straight - you are claiming you speak for every literate person from Thomas Aquinus on? Wow!
It has always meant "transcending the powers or ordinary course of nature"
Which can also be phrased as "beyond our current understanding of the natural world". Transcending means " To pass beyond the limits of" - "powers or ordinary course" are fluff and your definition used the word nature while I used " understanding of the natural world" - unless you are trying to argue nature (or better put: man's understanding of nature) is a fixed unchanging commodity, there is no conflict between the definition you cited and the one I posted.
But if your "what will eventually discovered to have a natural explanation" is to be used, how will that erxplanation ever be found if science declines to look for it.
That really does not make any sense.
Perhaps you can tell us how science can abandon empiricism and still be science.
You are not making any sense. I never claimed science should abandon empiricism.
I was into acting in my youth - I am familar with that term.
Ah, that brings back memories. When I was interviewing with the drama department at college - I told them I was a charter member of my high school's thesbian society.
That might be another good question sometime. ReMine apparently has written forest-destroying quantities of words here and there on Message Theory. Does anybody but ReMine profess to understand it?
An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. .... Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on."- and -
(Behe - Darwin's Black Box)
In fact, intelligent design is open to direct experimental rebuttal... In Darwin's Black Box I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design. The flip side of this claim is that the flagellum can't be produced by natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process.The claim is bacterial flagellum was "irreducibly complex" and an evoluntionary sequence was impossible.
(Behe - Biology and Philosophy. Nov 2001
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.
I hear the scraping noise of goalposts moving ...
Raphidiophrys pallida - axopodia that aren't used for motility.
A choanocyte from a freshwater sponge - Choanoflagellates critters with flagella that don't swim.
Synechococcus - A nonflagellated swimming cyanobacterium.
Halobacterium salinarum - flagella unlike the E. coli "motor".
Analysis of the motA flagellar motor gene from Rhodobacter sphaeroides - I guess the designer forgot the reverse gear in this model.
Irreducible Complexity Demystified - Swimming Systems
Yersinia enterocolitica - Type III Secretion Depends on the Proton Motive Force but Not on the Flagellar Motor Components MotA and MotB
Evolution in (Brownian) space - a model for the origin of the bacterial flagellum
Secretion by bacterial flagella - Linking the Type III secretion system (TTSS) to flagellum.
It's stupid to pursue things you have demonstrated are impossible. Chemists don't waste time trying to make stable compounds of Helium Oxide and Physicists don't waste time trying to build perpetual motion machines. Spontaneous generation is the perpetual motion machine of biology, yet folks continue trying to convince people that you can build one.
For the record, IIRC additional responses to Haldane's Dilemma are 4) nearby genes will hitch a ride on the ones being selected and 5) no one knows just how much of the genetic difference really makes a difference (i.e. how much is neutral and therefore not subject to Haldane's analysis).
Yes, but do you have nanosecond-by-nanosecond photo sequences of the process reporodued in a lab? That's how far those goalposts have moved at this point. Move them any farther and they'll start circling around back to each other.
Did she have a lisp?
I once saw a couple of thespians masticating in the dining room of the Four Seasons.
At least, neither expectorated in public.
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