Posted on 10/19/2005 5:10:52 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
One of intelligent design's leading experts could not identify the driving force behind the concept.
In his writings supporting intelligent design, Michael Behe, a Lehigh University biochemistry professor and author of "Darwin's Black Box," said that "intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose."
But during cross examination Tuesday, when plaintiffs' attorney Eric Rothschild asked Behe to identify those mechanisms, he couldn't.
When pressed, Behe said intelligent design does not propose a step-by-step mechanism, but one can still infer intelligent cause was involved by the "purposeful arrangement of parts."
Behe is the leading expert in the Dover Area School District's defense of its biology curriculum, which requires students to be made aware of intelligent design.
The First Amendment trial in U.S. Middle District Court is the first legal challenge to the inclusion of intelligent design in science class. At issue is whether it belongs in public school along with evolutionary theory.
In his work, "On the Origin of Species," Charles Darwin identified natural selection as the force driving evolutionary change in living organisms.
But Behe argued that natural selection alone cannot account for the complexity of life.
After Behe could not identify intelligent design's mechanism for change, Rothschild asked him if intelligent design then isn't just a negative argument against natural selection.
Behe disagreed, reiterating his statement that intelligent design is the purposeful arrangement of parts.
The bulk of Behe's testimony Monday and Tuesday had been on his concept of "irreducible complexity," the idea that in order for many organisms to evolve at the cellular level, multiple systems would have had to arise simultaneously. In many cases, he said, this is a mathematical impossibility.
He compared intelligent design to the Big Bang theory, in that when it was first proposed, some scientists dismissed it for its potential implications that God triggered the explosion.
He also said he is aware that the Big Bang theory was eventually accepted and has been peer-reviewed in scientific journals, and that intelligent design has been panned as revamped creationism by almost every mainstream scientific organization.
Rothschild asked Behe if he was aware that the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science both oppose its teaching in public school science classes, and even that Behe's colleagues have taken a position against it.
Behe knew of the academies' positions and said they misunderstand and mischaracterize intelligent design.
Behe also said he was aware that Lehigh University's Department of Biology faculty has posted a statement on its Web site that says, "While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific."
Earlier in the day, Behe had said under direct testimony that a creationist doesn't need any physical evidence to understand life's origins.
So creationism is "vastly 180 degrees different from intelligent design," he said.
Still, Behe said he believes that the intelligent designer is God.
In his article, "A Response to Critics of Darwin's Black Box," Behe wrote that intelligent design is "less plausible to those for whom God's existence is in question and is much less plausible for those who deny God's existence."
After referring to the article, Rothschild asked, "That's a God-friendly theory, Mr. Behe. Isn't it?"
Behe argued he was speaking from a philosophical view, much as Oxford University scientist Richard Dawkins was when he said Darwin's theory made it possible to be "an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
"Arguing from the scientific data only takes you so far," Behe said.
Would you be comfortable with a statement in textbooks that described ID as a theory that accepts "as a given" that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that all life is related by common descent? This is what ID is.
What ID adds to Darwinism is the concept that over the several billion year span of evolution, unnamed agents of a designer have intervened whenever a propitious mutation was needed.
well I think a lot of people would find that hard to comprehend
Are there any "alternate" points of view you would have trouble with in a public classroom? How about teaching Wicca? Or the joys of sapphic relations in sex-ed? Or how we might want to rethink our ideas on slavery given that it was practiced by the Greeks and Romans and therefore should be accorded equal status as a concept to the notion that slavery is a reprehensible insitution?
Or would you instead apply some standards when deciding what subject matter should be included in a non-University level curriculum?
BINGO. A winner.
I'm sorry, you are right. We'll just the liberals and the ACLU do all the deciding.
Peer review - "[it is] all part of the scientific process," said Dr. Michael Behe, today. As he has done for other scientists, one "reviews results...techniques... conclusions."
It has been stated here before that Behe has not submitted his own work on intelligent design for peer review. At the same time, Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff's counsel Eric Rothschild if the "peer review for Darwin's Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature." It was, according to Behe, even more rigorous. There were more than twice standard the number of reviewers and "they read [the book] more carefully... because this was a controversial topic."
One such reviewer, said Behe, was Dr. Michael Atchison, head of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania veterinary school. "He was selected," Behe said, "because he was the instructor of the editor's wife." While Behe was not in touch with him, "Professor Atchison contacted [Behe]...after the book came out."
Really?
Rothschild introduced this article by Professor Atichison, for the purposes of impeachment.
The editor [of Darwin's Black Box]was not certain that this manuscript was a good risk for publication. There were clearly theological issues at hand, and he was under the impression that these issues would be poorly received by the scientific community...
The editor shared his concerns with his wife. His wife was a student in my class. She advised her husband to give me a call. So, unaware of all this, I received a phone call from the publisher in New York. We spent approximately 10 minutes on the phone. After hearing a description of the work, I suggested that the editor should seriously consider publishing the manuscript...It sounded like this Behe fellow might have some good ideas, although I could not be certain since I had never seen the manuscript. We hung up and I never thought about it again. At least until two years later.
"Is this your understanding of the kind of peer review that Dr. Atcheson did of your book?" "No," Behe replied. Rothschild continued, "he didn't review it carefully… he didn't review it at all." Behe: "My understanding is different."
Atchison goes on in his article, using the events described to imply that God's will played a role in leading the editor to him and in his own encouragement of the publication of Behe's book.
Is this the sort of rigorous peer review that science dictates?
Also on the subject of scientific discourse, Behe repeated his oft quoted statement: "I've considered [peer-reviewed scientific conferences] to be a poor forum for discussing such ideas" because "you can't just present ID in an abbreviated fashion." Yet, when pressed, Behe still insisted that a high school classroom would provide an adequate forum "to mention [such] topics that [students] can pursue outside of the classroom."
submitted by Amy Laura Cahn, Community Education Organizer, ACLU of Pennsylvania
posted by ACLU of Pennsylvania at 9:23 PM 4 comments
Couldn't the "faith" of scientists be summarized as "effects have causes"
So what? The issue with ID is not the individual motivations of its proponents, it's whether the movement itself and the idea itself have religious goals.
I share Forrest's desire to keep a clear wall of separation between Church and State. I doubt I share very much else of her politics. I was in fact, once a member of the ACLU; I left when they started promoting purely socialist issues unrelated to civil liberties.
This is a pitiful argument. "Do overs" is what we pay scientists for. If we weren't "doing over" all we'd need is museums.
Not all observed phenomena have causes. Radioactive decay is uncaused.
If you've long understood it, then why did you ask whether "Congress" referred to a local school board? It is the answer to that very question.
However, what I do not understand is how a prayer at a high school football game or teaching that there MIGHT be some other explanation to the origin of man other than the atheist approved one or allowing a menorah or Nativity scene on public land at Christmas time is "establishing a religion".
As for prayers at public school football games and Nativity scenes in public squares, those who have a different religion or who believe that all religion is a bunch of superstitious nonsense have exactly the same right to have those beliefs respected by the government (that derives its power an legitimacy from the average atheist in EXACTLY the same manner as from the average Christian) as does the Christian.
I know for a fact that the Christians would be the first people screaming their heads off a school let a Muslim prayer leader into a school to talk about how great Mohammad was, or praising Allah. They don't consider that to their fellow Americans, Christians talk about Jesus or even non-denomination prayers about God is out of place and distasteful, when sponsored by the government or when the government gives it actual or tacit approval.
The Government simply has no right to ignore the Buddhists, atheists, Muslims, Jews, etc., and have someone up there praying to God or using municipal property to further the tenets of Christianity by displaying religious icons. Nor does it have any business giving governmentsl imprimatur to religion in general or any religion in particular. If people want to pray or display statutes of Jesus, let them do it in their churches and homes, where that stuff belongs, and not in the public square where it has no place.
For example, the atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. entering the courthouse where that idiot Roy Moore put up his ridiculous statute must look upon that and understand that the wheels of the very government which gains its legitimacy from him are already lined up against him on account of relgion. To do that to anyone is simply evil in a pluralistic nation, such as the United States of America.
As for teaching evolution, it is secular science, nothing more. The fact that atheist and agnostics (being rational, reality-minded folks) agree with it, or the fact that it gets creationists' panties in a knot, is really irrelevant. It is not a "tenet" of atheism, as evidenced by the many religious people who believe it; it is not religious in any way. The alternative, bringing in religious explanations into the public schools, is highly objectionable, because the public school system has simply no business inculcating superstitous or religious ideas into the minds of children.
Excuse my bluntness, but if someone want wants his kids growing up ignorant, believing that the world was poofed into existence 6,000 years ago or that there is some mystical invisible designer tinkering with life, that is his choice. But that choice does not give him or any parent the right to poison the minds of my kids and other children into believing that garbage.
Frankly, if religious people are so hot on teaching religion, they should send their kids to religious schools, and leave everybody else alone.
Yet, when pressed, Behe still insisted that a high school classroom would provide an adequate forum "to mention [such] topics that [students] can pursue outside of the classroom."
Sounds reasonable.
</flaming idiot mode>
In the sense that no preceeding event determines the time of decay. (Aristotle's effecient cause.) One could say the material cause is: "It is the nature of radioactive atoms to decay at a random time, etc. (time-energy complementarity...)."
So we FINALLY get down to it. You aren't really areligious, you are anti-religion. Well, guess what? Freedom of religion does mean freedom from relgioin and definitley not extend to give religion haters the power to suppress other religions. And no matter how much you hate it, we are STILL a nation of mostly Christians.
Give us the money that OUR taxes are being forced from us to spend on failed public schools where homosexuality is being promoted as good and taht peopel came from monkeys and the vast majority of us will be all too happy to send our children to private schools and we will "leave everybody else alone".
microgood: And they would be correct to ask that.
Not if Behe's whole point is that there simply exists no evolutionary scenario by which a non-IC thing can become an IC thing. When it becomes stupefyingly obvious that such scenarios exist and are easy, it takes the snake-oil hawker creationist zero seconds to seamlessly and without acknowledgement shift his ground to, "What is the PROOF of that? Were you there inside the cell when the mutations happened?"
So let's break that down and see if it bears any resemblance to what is happening here. What is Behe's characterization of IC?
"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." (Behe 1996b)As lifted from here. I could have chosen any of a dozen other characterizations of IC by various leading lights of creation/ID. What everyone supposedly understands about it is that it cannot have evolved by Darwin's successive slight modifications. Not that nobody was inside the cell watching the mutation happen, but it could not have happened, period.
So now it emerges in the dialogue with Miller that Behe's own example of blood clotting isn't really IC, at least in the more common non-cetacean versions. It's something like ONE OR TWO DELETION MUTATIONS AWAY FROM IC and Behe himself claims to have been saying it all along.
But one of the criticisms of Behe from the first is that he not only missed Muller's formulation of IC back when, but he missed Muller's answer to how IC things evolve. H. Allen Orr put it this way.
Behe's colossal mistake is that, in rejecting these possibilities, he concludes that no Darwinian solution remains. But one does. It is this: An irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts that, while initially just advantageous, become—because of later changes—essential. The logic is very simple. Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts may all be required.From Darwin v. Intelligent Design (Again).The point is there's no guarantee that improvements will remain mere improvements. Indeed because later changes build on previous ones, there's every reason to think that earlier refinements might become necessary...
I wish I could claim credit for this Darwinian model of irreducible complexity, but I'm afraid I've been scooped by eighty years. This scenario was first hinted at by the geneticist H. J. Muller in 1918 and worked out in some detail in 1939.
More detail and more specific scenarios from Don Linday.
So what is unreasonable? We know now that human and much other mammalian blood clotting has redundancies. "Two pathways" as Behe puts it. You can knock out at least one thing and there's still a route from A to Z.
So it would take at least one deletion mutation to knock out the redundancy to finally get the clotting to what most ID true believers thought it already is, a shining example of irreducible complexity. Is this somehow unthinkable? Are mutations unheard of? Do mutations only ADD genetic information and never STOMP on it? This sounds like the opposite of the usual cretinist dumb-dumbism. Aren't mutations ALWAYS "harmful?"
The creation/ID advocates's unwillingness to see or understand anything inconvenient is not science, although it probably does belong in higher education. I once took a course in Abnormal Psychology which could easily incorporate a study of creationist arguments and behavior.
Well, um, no. Causality is an organizing idea, it doesn't really correspond to any tangible natural phenomenon. This is sort of like asserting that english teachers have faith in diagramming sentences, or engineers have faith in karnaugh maps. While it's a true statement, it doesn't really reveal very much of value.
But let me respond to a more sensible version of your argument. The broad claim I presume is being made here is that Darwinism is no more valid than ID, or strict creationism, because both require some measure of faith, rather, I suppose, than mathematically rigorous proof. Yet even the acceptance of formal mathematical proofs is predicated on the acceptance by faith of the basic assumptions upon which proofs operate, and the acceptance, by faith, that the domains of discourse the proofs are intended to address, are accurately mapped.
I will grant that religious faith is altogether more whizbang super-inspiring than secular faiths. Galileo and Einstein will probably never have masses of the faithful converting their enemies to their faith using swords and thumbscrews.
"I wish I could remember which website I saw that quote on before ..."
Is all you can say when someone says something that challenges you, "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"??
I have told the truth about that conversation.
If you persist in calling me a liar then I will let the Admin Mods deal with it.
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