Posted on 09/04/2006 12:14:53 PM PDT by curiosity
Advocates of American-style "intelligent design" (ID) have had a tough year. Their anti-evolution arguments have been soundly rejected by the scientific community, they lost spectacularly in a highly-publicised federal trial on the issue of ID in schools, and most recently the voters in Kansas rejected ID school board candidates in a statewide election. So they may surely be forgiven for hoping that Pope Benedict's discussions on evolution this month with his former students could bring some rare good news.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentisfree.guardian.co.uk ...
BTW Miller's claim to have disproved the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flaggelum is basically a straw man argument - he's changing what irreducible complexity means.
Amazing!Polls have shown 86% of the people believe in God.Must be a lot of liars out there because you can't believe in God and reject(ID)CREATIONISM.
Any reasonable legal critique of the "decision" demonstrates that the judge didn't have his head screwed on straight, and the decision has been universally panned as being absurd law. The only thing "spectacular" about the decision was weak it was.
That's empirically false. I believe in God and I also reject both ID and creationism.
Not to be a nitpicker, but in saying you believe in God you COULD be lying - (but I don't believe that you are). So it can't really be empirically false. Of course it can't be empirically true either.
A description of another judge by a lawyer I knew also fits Judge Jones of the Pa. ID case: "An incompetent on a power trip." He was almost as bad as the Carter appointee who ruled against the NSA monitoring of terrorist communications.
There are credible reports that someone at the DI either ghostwrote the editorial, or at the very least, had significant input into it.
but in general scientific ID advocates don't care what the Pope says about the topic.
Then why has the pope's symposium been getting so much attention on ID blogs?
BTW Miller's claim to have disproved the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flaggelum is basically a straw man argument - he's changing what irreducible complexity means.
I don't think he's disproven the irreducible complexity of the flagellum or even claims to have done so. Rather, he's merely pointed out that scientists have come up with a plausible evolutionary pathway for it, despite its irreducible complexity.
I believe Miller's testimony in the court case was one of the primary things judge Jones relied on in rejecting the IC claim. Of course the judge had no business ruling on who had the better argument in the first place. It had nothing to do with the legal merits of the case.
Check out this excellent critique of the decision: Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design And the Kitzmiller V. Dover Decision
"That's empirically false. I believe in God and I also reject both ID and creationism."
Are you rejecting the historic understanding of God as Creator? The Apostles Creed begins with "I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth...."
Those who hold to the Judeo/Christian worldview and yet deny the creative power of God are denying a fundamental dogma underlying all that we believe. We may differ on the details - exactly how God created the universe, and in fact such things are quite beyond our understanding. But we cannot deny God as Creator. Those who do so have, knowingly or unknowingly, chosen to side with an atheistic "explanation" for the existence of the universe and all that is in it.
When I say "scientific ID advocates" I basically mean those who are relying strictly on scientfic arguments to advance ID. Attention's not the same as relying on it. Pro-evo blogs presumably "paid a lot of attention" to the federal judge's anti-ID decision, but I don't think that scientists who advocate evolution would have changed their mind if he had decided differently.
I don't think he's disproven the irreducible complexity of the flagellum or even claims to have done so.
Wrong:
The most powerful rebuttals to the flagellum story, however, have not come from direct attempts to answer the critics of evolution. Rather, they have emerged from the steady progress of scientific work on the genes and proteins associated with the flagellum and other cellular structures. Such studies have now established that the entire premise by which this molecular machine has been advanced as an argument against evolution is wrong – the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex. As we will see, the flagellum – the supreme example of the power of this new "science of design" – has failed its most basic scientific test.No doubt about it—the evolution of biochemical systems, even complex multipart ones, is explicable in terms of evolution. Behe is wrong. (Miller 1999, 147)
The bolding above is Miller's bolding.
Rather, he's merely pointed out that scientists have come up with a plausible evolutionary pathway for it, despite its irreducible complexity.
They have not come up with an evolutionary pathway for it, plausible or otherwise.
Nice article. I've already bothered my ping list enough for today, so I'll leave you with a peaceful thread.
bttt
ID and creationism have nothing to do with that proposition. Rather, they are specific claims about how God created, not whether he created. ID claims that God needed to work mini-miracles to create certain "irreduciblely complex" features of life that Darwinian evolution supposedly cannot account for. Creationism claims that God specially created each distinct species. I reject both of these claims, and instead believe that God created using the natural process of Darwinian evolution.
Miller's point is that there exists a plausible evolutionary pathway for the flagellum. If you define irreducible complexity to mean that it could not have evolved from a precursor, then that would imply the flagellum is not irreducibly complex. If you define IC as consisting of multiple parts, each of which is necessary to preserve function, than the flagellum is still irreducibly complex, but then irreducible complexity is not a barrier to Darwinian evolution.
ID advocates have used both definitions of irreducible complexity, so Miller is perfectly justified in what he says.
They have not come up with an evolutionary pathway for it, plausible or otherwise.
Yes they have:
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html
I am not aware of it being defined at all in the first way, at least not by scientists. Once a term is created the precise meaning tends to, shall I say, mutate? Certainly Behe has rigorously only defined it in the second way and it is what has been applied to the flagellum. There is no logical way of asserting that something could not have evolved from a precursor, so that couldn't really be the definition of IC.
We can only say that a way which overcomes known barriers to evolving from a precursor is improbable based on everything we know. IC is just ONE of those barriers. IC is one of many possible barriers. It's important to define IC correctly because once you start positing other theories to get around it like Miller has, it has its own set of problems. Also, some people have tried to claim the very concept of IC is invalid so you have to be clear about what it is.
Yes they have:
That link you gave is the one I was quoting from in the last post! There really is no evolutionary pathway defined there. An evolutionary pathway is a series of mutations. Period. He certainly doesn't do that. No one has ever done that with the flagellum. In fact I don't think it's been done with any biological system, but certainly not the flagellum. He is referring in that link to the evo theory of exaptation, where something takes on one function and then further along evolves into something with a completely different function. There has never been a documented case of that.
Furthermore, there is nothing plausible about it.
...Miller applied his argument to real biological situations when he claimed that some sub-systems of the bacterial flagellum can perform a different role in some organisms. For example, Miller observed that the Type III Secretory System (TTSS), which uses approximately 1/4 of the genes involved in the flagellum, can be used by predatory bacteria to inject toxins into Eukaryotic cells. According to Miller, the presence of the TTSS shows that the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex. However, Miller’s Type III Secretory System argument contains three primary problems:
(A) Experts say the evidence suggests that the TTSS evolved from the flagellum, and not the other way around.
(B) Behe and other ID-proponents have long-acknowledged “exaptation” or “co-option” as an attempt to evolve biological complexity, and have observed many problems with “co-option” explanations.
(A) Which came first: the TTSS or the Flagellum (or neither)?
Firstly, it is worth noting that a leading authority on bacterial systematics, Milton Saier, still believes that TTSS evolved FROM the flagellum, not the other way around, making Miller's claim highly dubious. While Saier acknowledges some may disagree with him, he maintains that the TTSS evolved from the flagellum:
“Regarding the bacterial flagellum and TTSSs, we must consider three (and only three) possibilities. First, the TTSS came first; second, the Fla system came first; or third, both systems evolved from a common precursor. At present, too little information is available to distinguish between these possibilities with certainty.
(B) Behe’s Clear Responses to Evolutionary Appeals to Exaptation:
...consider these passages from Darwin’s Black Box in which Behe presents the problems of exaptational arguments when discussing the evolution of the cilium:
"Because the cilium is irreducibly complex, no direct gradual route leads to its production. So an evolutionary story for the cilium must envision a circuitous route, perhaps adapting parts that were originally used for other purposes." (Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pg. 65-66.) "For example, suppose you wanted to make a mousetrap. In your garage you might have a piece of wood from an old Popsicle stick (for the platform), a spring from an old wind-up clock, a piece of metal (for the hammer) in the form of a crowbar, a darning needle for the holding bar, and a bottle cap that you fancy to use as a catch. But these pieces couldn't form a functioning mousetrap without extensive modification, and while the modification was going on, they would be unable to work as a mousetrap. Their previous functions make them ill- suited for virtually any new role as part of a complex system. In the case of the cilium, there are analogous problems. The mutated protein that accidentally stuck to microtubules would block their function as "highways" of transport. A protein that indiscriminately bound microtubules together would disrupt the cell's shape--just as a building's shape would be disrupted by an erroneously placed cable that accidentally pulled together girders supporting the building. A linker that strengthened microtubule bundles for structural supports would tend to make them inflexible, unlike the flexible linker nexin. An unregulated motor protein, freshly binding to microtubules, would push apart micrutubules that should be close together. The incipient cilium would not be at the cell surface. If it were not at the cell surface, then internal beating could disrupt the cell; but even if it were at the cell surface, the number of motor proteins would probably not be enough to move the cilium. And even if the cilium moved, an awkward stroke would not necessarily move the cell. And if the cell did move, it would be an unregulated motion using energy and not corresponding to any need of the cell.” (Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pg. 66-67.)
“Even if a system is irreducibly complex (and thus cannot have been produced directly), however, one can not definitively rule out the possibility of an indirect, circuitous route. As the complexity of an interacting system increases, though, the likelihood of such an indirect route drops precipitously. And as the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin’s criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows.” (Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pg. 40.)
"At best the TTSS [Type-III Secretory System] represents one possible step in the indirect Darwinian evolution of the bacterial flagellum. But that still wouldn’t constitute a solution to the evolution of the bacterial flagellum. What’s needed is a complete evolutionary path and not merely a possible oasis along the way. To claim otherwise is like saying we can travel by foot from Los Angeles to Tokyo because we’ve discovered the Hawaiian Islands. Evolutionary biology needs to do better than that.” (William A. Dembski, Rebuttal to Reports by Opposing Expert Witnesses, at http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.09.Expert_Rebuttal_Dembski.pdf.)
Though Miller has accounted for the origin of only a fraction of the flagellar parts, Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer also explain how mere availability of parts is insufficient to explain the evolution of a system:
“[E]ven if all the protein parts were somehow available to make a flagellar motor during the evolution of life, the parts would need to be assembled in the correct temporal sequence similar to the way an automobile is assembled in factory. Yet, to choreograph the assembly of the parts of the flagellar motor, present-day bacteria need an elaborate system of genetic instructions as well as many other protein machines to time the expression of those assembly instructions. Arguably, this system is itself irreducibly complex. In any case, the co-option argument tacitly presupposes the need for the very thing it seeks to explain—a functionally interdependent system of proteins.” (Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer, Genetic Analysis of coordinate flagellar and type III regulatory circuits in pathogenic bacteria, pg. 8, at http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=389.)
Similarly, philosopher Angus Menuge lays out a number of obstacles which must be overcome by "co-option" or "exaptation" explanations, none of which were addressed by Miller during the trial. Menuge writes:
“For a working flagellum to be built by exaptation, the five following conditions would all have to be met:“C1: Availability. Among the parts available for recruitment to form the flagellum, there would need to be ones capable of performing the highly specialized tasks of paddle, rotor, and motor, even though all of these items serve some other function or no function.(Angus Menuge, Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science, pgs. 104-105 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).)“C2: Synchronization. The availability of these parts would have to be synchronized so that at some point, either individually or in combination, they are all available at the same time.
“C3: Localization. The selected parts must all be made available at the same ‘construction site,’ perhaps not simultaneously but certainly at the time they are needed.
“C4: Coordination. The parts must be coordinated in just the right way: even if all of the parts of a flagellum are available at the right time, it is clear that the majority of ways of assembling them will be non-functional or irrelevant.
“C5: Interface compatibility. The parts must be mutually compatible, that is, ‘well-matched’ and capable of properly ‘interacting’: even if a paddle, rotor, and motor are put together in the right order, they also need to interface correctly.”
William Dembski takes a similar approach to that of Menuge. Dembski effectively combines some of Menuge’s criteria in order to develop a means of calculating the probability of constructing an irreducibly complex object. In calculating the probability of a “discrete combinatorial object” one must take into account the probability of originating the parts, the probability of localizing the parts all in once place, and the probability of configuring the parts together:
Table 1. Comparison of Dembski and Menuge’s required explanatory components for any exaptation-based account of evolution (Table based upon the descriptions in William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot be Purchased Without Intelligence, pg. 291 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)):
| Dembski’s Factor | Description | Analogue in Menuge’s Criteria |
| Porig | Probability of originating the building blocks for that objects. | C1 |
| Plocal | Probability of locating the building blocks in one place once they are given. | C2, C3 |
| Pconfig | Probability of configuring the building blocks once they are given and in one place. | C4, C5 |
It is clear that Miller has found that the probability for originating about 1/4 of the flagellar proteins might be “1/1” if the TTSS (or perhaps a similar structure) existed prior to the flagellum. However he has not accounted for the origin of the remaining the flagellar proteins, nor has he addressed Plocal or Pconfig in his evolutionary scenario. In light of Menuge's and Dembski’s criteria, it seems fair to demand answers from Miller to the following questions:
- What function was performed by the paddle, rotor, or motor outside of the flagellum? (At trial, Miller explained the function for the basal body of the flagellum via the TTSS, but left the most complex and vital motorized portions of the flagellum unexplained.) - How did the parts become synchronized in the flagellum? (At trial, Miller never discussed this.) - How did the parts become localized within the flagellum at the same construction site? (At trial, Miller never addressed this issue.) - How did the parts become structurally coordinated so as to interact when assembled to produce the flagellar swimming function? (Again, Miller also never addressed this issue at trial.)
Thus Miller never answered any of these important questions at the trial. Rather, he presented a straw version of testing irreducible complexity whereby he convinced the Judge in a fashion which did not come remotely close to accounting for how the flagellum might have actually evolved.
If Miller could find functions for all flagellar sub-systems outside of the flagellum, he would admittedly be making progress towards an evolutionary explanation by satisfying Angus Menuge's first criterion of "Availability" (C1). However, as Minnich and Meyer ask:
“[T]he other thirty proteins in the flagellar motor (that are not present in the TTSS) are unique to the motor and are not found in any other living system. From whence, then, were these protein parts co-opted?” (Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer, Genetic Analysis of coordinate flagellar and type III regulatory circuits in pathogenic bacteria, pg. 8, at http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=389)
I should point out that Miller has said that IC requires that there be no functional subsystem, and that the existence of one automatically disproves that a system is IC, which is plainly false and is a straw man argument. I believe, but am not sure, he claimed that at the trial.
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