Posted on 08/21/2007 9:53:14 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
In 1996, Pennsylvania's own Michael J. Behe launched a frontal attack upon Darwinian evolution with the publication of Darwin's Black Box. Behe, a mild-mannered molecular biologist at Lehigh University, argued politely but vigorously that the standard Darwinian explanation (random mutations plus natural selection) simply couldn't explain the evolution of a number of significant structures and processes observed in living things. Intricate processes like human blood clotting, and intricate structures like the bacterial flagellum (which is built uncannily like an outboard motor) were "irreducibly complex" arrangements that couldn't have arisen by a series of chance steps. They therefore must have been designed, by an intelligence of some kind. Behe's book soon became the flagship of the movement known as intelligent design (ID).
Behe's presentation and subsequent defense of ID (including his testimony at the Dover trial in 2005) outraged much of the biological community. He was denounced by the self-styled defenders of science - biologists like Ken Miller and Jerry Coyne, and non-scientists like Michael Ruse and Barbara Forrest. They accused Behe (along with his allies in the ID movement) of recycling disproved arguments, of insolently refusing to genuflect before the Darwinian consensus, of misunderstanding the nature of scientific theory, and of trying to slip God (disguised as "the intelligent designer") into public-school science classrooms.
Intelligent design, if not nipped in the bud, would turn science classes into seminaries, set back modern medicine by denying the evolution of antibiotic resistance, and destroy confidence in science in general, relegating America to a backward technological status.
There was some reasonable criticism. Behe said that the bacterial flagellum could have been created only by multiple coordinated genetic changes, and that such coordination was beyond the power of random mutation. Miller argued that, given enough time, random mutations could accumulate, producing a flagellum by stages. Behe's purely qualitative argument couldn't disprove this possibility; without hard numbers, how did he know what random mutation could or couldn't accomplish?
Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, provides some hard numbers, coupled with an ingenious argument. The key to determining the exact powers of Darwinian evolution, says Behe, lies with fast-reproducing microbes. Some, such as malaria, HIV, and E. coli, reproduce so quickly that within a few decades, or at most a few millennia, they generate as many mutations as a larger, slower-breeding animal would in millions of years. By observing how far these creatures have evolved in recent times, we can estimate the creative limits of random mutation.
In the case of malaria, the creative limits appear quite low. Over the last few thousand years, several thousand billion billion malarial cells have been unable to develop an evolutionary response to the sickle-cell mutation, which protects its human bearers from malaria. On the other hand, malaria has proved able to develop Darwinian resistance to the antibiotic chloroquine. This resistance is based upon two simultaneous mutations affecting a malarial protein. Yet this rare double mutation has occurred fewer than 10 times since chloroquine was introduced 50 years ago, during which time a hundred billion billion malarial cells have been born. If this indicates the typical rate of occurrence of double mutations, then the Darwinian transformation of our pre-chimp ancestor into homo sapiens, which would have required at least some double mutations, would have taken at least a thousand trillion years, a time span greater than the age of the universe.
Drawing upon parallel mutation studies of HIV and E. coli for confirmation, Behe concludes that random mutations cannot explain the origin of most of the complex structures in living things. He concedes that Darwinian processes can make new species, but argues that they are incompetent to generate new kingdoms, phyla, or classes. The creative limit, the "edge of evolution," lies somewhere between the level of species and the level of class. Darwinian processes can account for the difference between a dog and a wolf, maybe even a dog and a bear, but not the difference between a lizard and a bird. Something other than random mutation must have produced such differences; for Behe, the "something" is intelligent design.
The response to Behe has been predictable. The editors of the major print media have assigned known enemies of ID to trash the book - Richard Dawkins for the New York Times; Coyne for the New Republic; Miller for Nature; Ruse for Toronto's Globe & Mail. A large part of each review is ad hominem, concerned with Behe's alleged religious agenda, his minority status among biologists, and other irrelevant matters. In Dawkins' review, the science is barely touched, and it's not clear from Ruse's review that he has even opened the cover of the book. Behe deserves better. The Edge of Evolution makes a serious, quantitative argument about the limits of Darwinian evolution. Evolutionary biology cannot honestly ignore it.
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Cameron Wybrow is a freelance writer with a doctorate from McMaster University. He has published two books on the origin of modern science.
external influence and supernatural influence are two different things...
you are leaving out part of the theory of evolution. while you are correct about natural selection, you are missing the first step: random mutation that creates the field from which natural selection occurs. the scientist’s point here is that random mutation does not generate enough variability from which to evolve certain aspects of even simple life through natural selection.
That is why Behe “the scientist” should be called Behe the ‘Astronomy is Sceince’-ist or Behe the ‘God of the Gap’-ist.
This is something I've been wondering. For those who haven't followed the ID debate, the ID advocates start with the world as we see it, and ask how it could have gotten this way. They posit three possible explanations: necessity, chance, design. Some things are the way they are because of necessity (the arrangement of sodium atoms in a salt crystal, for instance). If something is not necessary, it still might be achieved by chance or accident. If neither necessity or chance is an adequate explanation, the only thing left is design.
The main line of argument of the ID proponents is that chance, i.e. "random mutation followed by natural selection," can't explain what we see. They present some fairly sophisticated mathematical arguments for this.
However, I wonder if they have rejected "necessity" too quickly. At some deeper level, is there something about the nature of matter that requires "accidents" to go in a certain direction. Their calculations about the impossibility of randomness getting us here may be correct but irrelevant, if there's something besides pure randomness at work.
Obviously I have no empirical evidence to support this idea, which amounts to nothing more than a supposition. However, it might be worth considering as an alternative to the arguments about whether chance is sufficient or not to produce what we see about us.
Why should Dawkins' religious beliefs have anything to do with it? IDists have claimed over and over again that ID cannot identify the designer, so ID is no basis for arguing for the existence of God.
Why should Dawkins' religious beliefs have anything to do with it? IDists have claimed over and over again that ID cannot identify the designer, so ID is no basis for arguing for the existence of God.
They also claim that ID is science, until folks disagree with it. Then they accuse them bashing religion. (Nice work if you can get it.)
>>They accused Behe ... of insolently refusing to genuflect before the Darwinian consensus<<
Good thing there is no bias in this article. :)
Call it the principle of malignant reading. He’s been doing it for years with the arguments of Darwin’s Black Box, and he continues it in this review. For example, despite being repeatedly told by me and others that by an “irreducibly complex” system I mean one in which removal of a part destroys the function of the system itself, Miller says, no, to him the phrase will mean that none of the remaining parts can be used for anything else — a straw man which can easily be knocked down. Unconscionably, he passes off his own tendentious view to the public as mine. People who look to Miller for a fair engagement of the arguments of intelligent design are very poorly served. [emphasis added]
In what way does the Cambrian explosion defy explanation, even if it is real and not an illusion?
How convenient.
And I didn't say that the Cambrian explosion "defied" explanation, but implied that transitional forms - or lack thereof - don't seem to explain it.
I suspect there is, but I also suspect something along the lines of intelligence put it there. “It” is probably something along the lines of magnetism, an invisible force whose effects can be seen even though the force itself can’t be (though we’re further along in our understanding of magnetism now, it was until fairly recent decades simply a mysterious invisible force). My operating hypothesis is that intelligence first evolved as energy, not as an outgrowth of material “life”. Science has not seriously explored how energy-only intelligence might have created and manipulated matter. It might well have endowed matter with a magnetism-like force that tends to pull it towards the energy-source of intelligence.
How convenient.
But true. The science of origins is in its infancy, with no well-documented theory at present. There are a lot of ideas, but none has risen to stand above the others as a scientific theory.
But creationists still insist on joining the study of origins with subsequent evolution and speciation. I am not sure why this is so, as scientists have no trouble separating the two fields. If I had to guess, I would speculate that creationists feel they can get more bang for the buck by lumping most of what they disagree with under the terms "Darwinism" and "evolution" and trashing both, along with everything they can associate with either term. The fact that they are different fields, with different levels of data and explanation, is irrelevant--both must be trashed!
And I didn't say that the Cambrian explosion "defied" explanation, but implied that transitional forms - or lack thereof - don't seem to explain it.
There has been a lot more information on this period coming to light in the last couple of years. You may want to check out the science websites and see what is new.
I think there’s a middle ground here. Instead of the randomness of natural selection or the “outside” influence of intelligent design, why can’t design be an inherent property within the system?
A long forgotten field of study called General Systems Theory started to wrestle with these issues before it became appropriated by certain government types with a different agenda. The objective of that field of study would span the various pin-headed objections on both sides.
GST is more in the spirit of math and physics, where it is believed that it is possible to describe, predict and control complex systems by discovering the right sets of mathematical equations. That, for example, a tantalizing clue came from finding that the same set of equations governed the activity of bees at the entrance to a hive and the movement of molecules at the air-liquid interface was the sort of thing they hoped to find more of in their research. But alas.
Then along came chaos theory some 20 years later. Some of its claims challenge ideas about general systems theory. They also challenge our more statist notions of God.
Also, the notion of control of human events by God that power controversy over ID are themselves pretty naive. Critics need to ask themselves just what they mean when they trash ID.
As for “inherent properties within a system”, John Von Neuman, late great Hungarian mathematician, made a similar proposal many years ago when he suggested that our ability to understand complex math is determined by our genetic and neural make up.
Anyway, my point is there is a lot that is ideologically simpatico with ID in mainstream academia. You just need to look for it.
ping
Wow. Behe takes an elegant approach. The evos are doomed.
Some day the being that left it’s excrement on it’s way through our system will return.
.
.
With a can of Raid.
They accused Behe... of insolently refusing to genuflect before the Darwinian consensus,...
Evidently Wybrow has an agenda of his own, no less than Richard Dawkins or Ken Miller.
Over the last few thousand years, several thousand billion billion malarial cells have been unable to develop an evolutionary response to the sickle-cell mutation, which protects its human bearers from malaria.
I can think of two reasons for this. The first is that, obviously, the parasites that cause malaria get along just fine, notwithstanding the sickle-cell mutation. The second has to do with what I think of as the thief's paradox: the thief needs a legal order which punishes theft, for without it there would be no society on which he could prey. Similarly, a parasite that is too successful in killing its hosts wipes itself out.
If this indicates the typical rate of occurrence of double mutations, then the Darwinian transformation of our pre-chimp ancestor into homo sapiens, which would have required at least some double mutations, would have taken at least a thousand trillion years, a time span greater than the age of the universe.
If Wybrow reports him correctly, Behe is saying simultaneously that double mutations must have happened and that they couldn't have happened. I find neither argument convincing, but obviously both can't be right.
>>Call it the principle of malignant reading. He’s been doing it for years with the arguments of Darwin’s Black Box, and he continues it in this review. For example, despite being repeatedly told by me and others that by an “irreducibly complex” system I mean one in which removal of a part destroys the function of the system itself, Miller says, no, to him the phrase will mean that none of the remaining parts can be used for anything else <<
This Behe looking backwards rather than forward.
Its not important if the removal of a piece causes the whole to fail at its new functions. The questions whether the individual pieces could all have developed with useful purposes.
This could be an oversight or a mistake on his part - I don’t any maliciousness in his error.
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