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countrycousinThis book came out in 1996 in hardback and subsequently in paperback. I read it recently because of the Intelligent Design issues that arose recently in Kansas and Pennsylvania. Behe was an expert witness in support of presenting Intelligent Design in public school curricula in the Pennsylvania trial. His book has been adequately reviewed - you know how to search, but I'll mention some below. I don't know that it has received adequate unbiased reviews. I shall, of course, try to provide one, but I was not a fan of Intelligent Design before and Behe did not convert me. He did write a good book; it is quite readable and raises several points worth discussing.
I was trained as a physicist - my last formal biology lesson was in tenth grade. I have no intention of examining Behe's microbiology claims.
But, first, what does he present?
REVIEW
He starts out with some general biology facts and concepts and an introduction to Darwin's ideas and to evolution. "Evolution" covers a lot of ground. For this review, I'll distinguish three concepts and try to use the quoted phrases consistently:
"evolution" - the idea that genetic changes happen spontaneously for a number of reasons, and that those that improve an organism's chances of producing a viable next generation in a particular environment become more numerous over many generations are thereby selected by whatever environment does so.
"speciation" - the idea that through such processes and others, different branches might be selected by different environments and eventually become distinct from each other, resulting in different biological species.
"evolution-as-history" - the idea that the building blocks of life formed through natural processes and that all of the species that we experienced today developed naturally through evolution and speciation.
Behe discusses the basis for "evolution-as-history". Some discussions of this subject call it "Evolution" (with the capital E). He presents Darwin's concepts and the reasons for them. He stresses the concept that genetic changes are thought to occur in small amounts and that something results in some particular change being favored. Thus, he expects evolutionary change to occur in small steps. One step has to be favored to build up enough of a local population that some change in the new population can be favored in its turn.
He then presents three examples for which he gives compelling arguments why such a small step-by-step process could not have produced the result we see today. He calls these examples of "irreducible complexity". The biological mechanisms described have several interrelated components. If just one of these component fails to do its job, the whole mechanism fails. This is to be distinguished from other cases where, if one part fails, the overall mechanism might still work, but less effectively. In the examples of irreducible complexity that he presents, most of the parts have to work correctly or the complete mechanism fails. He points out that these are just three of a large number of examples that today have no established natural explanations
He mentions, briefly, some other natural processes that some have proposed as potential explanations, and rejects them.
He reports on a literature review to study progress in developing such explanations, and finds little reported effort and no progress.
He then presents Intelligent Design as the only reasonable explanation for these observed phenomena. (In the section Detection of Design he uses an unnoticed elephant in a room as an analogy - friends from the Bujold list would be reminded of "What's an elephant have to do around here, to advance and be recognized?".) He points out that Intelligent Design is not the same as Creationism (though the latter who reviewed this book were generally enthusiastic). The idea is that there are known areas in current biological knowledge where there is no good natural explanation to go from one established point to another. Behe's contention is that, for those cases involving irreducible complexity, there never will be such an explanation: the complexity exhibits the characteristics of having been designed - one should say so.
The last chapter is on Science, Philosophy, and Religion. He starts off this chapter - I'll quote from the start of the second paragraph: "The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell - to investigate life at the molecular level - is a loud, clear, piercing cry of 'design!' The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science." Obviously, not all agree, and he spends this chapter listing some human frailties in explanation. Since he doesn't seem to recognize what I consider to be one of the most important reasons we are reluctant to join his enthusiasm, I will stop the review here and go into critique. I'll close the review by repeating that the book is clear and well written. It is clearly not unbiased, but, then, neither are many of the reviews.
CRITIQUE
1. He states that there are several areas in tracing evolution-as-history where there is no established mechanism to jump gaps in the record. A big such area, of course, is at the beginning, but he chose three other examples. I grant this point.
2. In the examples he chose (and, I'm sure, many others) he sees no possible mode of explanation. Well, if he doesn't see a way, I'm not going to. I won't dispute this point, but others do. The bottom line is, however, at the moment the explanations don't exist.
3. In the examples he chose, the complexity invites the notion that the parts were brought together with intent - that there was Intelligent Design. I'll grant that that the notion presents itself. It seems that those who adopt the notion are mostly those who really want to.
So, why don't I and others agree with him?
First, the idea of Intelligent Design is hardly new. A few hundred years ago, it was routinely applied in those cases where people had no idea of what was going on. The revolution was that most of these cases could be given natural explanations. One reason Behe's elephant is being ignored is because it's been around forever - we thought we had persuaded it to stand quietly in the corner and contemplate moral and spiritual issues.
There are methods for extending natural knowledge. They work pretty well. They definitely have not discovered all natural knowledge. But they keep eating away at the fringes.
The biggest objection to declaring any one region of the physical world as due to Design is that it is tantamount to giving up on research in that region. (Of course, that is only an official giving up - some mavericks would keep trying despite stern department chairs and disapproving funding agencies.)
Historically, such regions have gotten smaller and smaller (compensated by new regions continually opening up). Whenever such region had been used as a basis for a particular faith, some fancy footwork was required when it turned out to be a natural phenomenon - that is one reason science and religion have set up the boundaries that most of us recognize.
Behe thinks that scientists are being irrational in their stubborn pursuit of natural explanations. He quotes Richard Dickerson as describing science as a game, where the rule is to find natural explanations without invoking the supernatural. He goes on to say that such a process rules out Intelligent Design by fiat. Behe seems to find this unfair.
There is this clear distinction, which Behe never mentions:
The explanations advanced by science are all based on processes that can be observed in nature and/or laboratories. We have not been successful in reliably demonstrating the existence of supernatural influences.
It is, as Behe maintains, true that there now exist many deep holes in the explanation chain for evolution-as-history. For those things for which plausible explanations exist, there are demonstrable natural processes to back them up. There is none of that for Intelligent Design. Behe argues that his opponents would never even consider Intelligent Design. I believe he is correct. If we had more reliable evidence of the supernatural working in the everyday world, I believe that would change. Until then, he has an empty complaint.
I haven't discussed Behe's reasons for inferring Intelligent Design in the first place. He invokes Paley's Intelligent Watchmaker argument and cleans it up a bit. I think the cleanup irrelevant. Basically, for someone who believes in a powerful Deity who directly effects changes in the natural world, invoking such a being as an Intelligent Designer is no great leap. For someone who either does not believe in such Deity, or who suspects that any such does not make a habit of directly affecting the natural world, then jumping from examples of complexity to infer the existence and interference of a Being immensely more complex for which no explanations at all exist is not logic at all - it is merely replacing one apparently intractable problem by another which is defined to be intractable and so one is excused from further scientific effort. Behe does not look at it in that way. His point is that these mechanisms are so complex that it looks like some intelligent agent designed them. If we don't happen to have a reasonable natural explanation at hand, we should assume that an intelligent agent did design them. The fact is that we have had such success in determining natural causes for natural phenomena that the appearance of some problems that are apparently intractable at present is not going to discourage most scientists. As Behe has observed.
CONTROVERSY
The controversy concerns whether or not to present Intelligent Design as a serious contender for the admittedly holey evolution-as-history theory. I have no objection to pointing out that evolution-as-history is not completely established, and that details may change. They certainly have throughout my lifetime. I have a fundamental objection to presenting any explanation involving the supernatural in public schools. In my opinion that violates the intent of the separation of church and state. (Behe explicitly relates "supernatural" and "higher intelligence" in his philosophy chapter.) I suspect that were my position to be agreed upon, there would still be controversy over how much to emphasize that evolution-as-history isn't all there yet. For some it is, "yeah, but it's just a matter of time" and for others it is "it's never going to happen - God works in mysterious ways". It is avoiding just this sort of controversy that we have the separation of church and state.
OTHER RESOURCES
You can create your own list with Google, but:
Kenneth Miller of Brown from Creation/Evolution. This is a good review, listing some of the book's strengths and giving a particular account of fossil records showing how one complex system did in fact evolve.
Keith Robison of Harvard Dept of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Talk.Origins. This includes a link to Behe responses. It also includes a link to a discussion of why Behe's mousetrap example is not irreducibly complex - other than illustrating that one can quibble about the definition, I don't see much point to that discussion.
Robert Dorit in American Scientist addresses some technical flaws in Behe's argument.
A Conversation with "Steve", identified as a molecular biologist and self-identified as a believer in reformed Christianity. This conversation is worth reading - it presents a viewpoint from a technically knowledgeable, devout person, and offers some criticism of the irreducible complexity argument as well as a perspective that is more from the center of this debate than from either of its fringes. I got the link from related![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
carbonelle posts here and here ; thank you.
Ray Bohlin presents a view from Behe's support.
SOME RELATED ISSUES
Falsifiability
"Falsifiability" is an intrinsic part of what we consider to be meaningful theories. A theory should be able to make some particular prediction. One should then be able to construct an experiment to test the prediction. If the experiment is done and does not return the expected result, the theory is falsified. Of course, if the theory is well-accepted, there will be lots of discussion about how well the experiment was performed and interpreted, but that is the concept of how scientific theories are supposed to work.
Intelligent Design is criticized for not being falsifiable. Its supporters criticize evolution-as-history for not being falsifiable. Let's consider the second charge first, that evolution-as-history is not falsifiable. The charge has considerable merit. Whatever happened as history happened and almost all of the record is forever lost. The best that one can do to reconstruct history is to get as much of the record as possible and then spin plausible tales using mechanisms that are falsifiable. So falsification does get into the picture. The processes of evolution are very well established and are falsifiable. They are used to fill in the gaps of evolution-as-history. Behe and others point out quite rightly that, at the moment, not all of those gaps have been plausibly filled. But the process for filling them is quite clear - one must invoke mechanisms that can be falsified. It still does not produce a falsifiable evolution-as-history - we still will not know for sure what environments existed at what times. We may succeed in demonstrating that something could have occurred. In many cases it will be impossible to demonstrate that it did occur.
Back to Intelligent Design. One could say that parts are falsifiable. Behe is claiming that certain things are irreducibly complex and could only possibly have been designed. Well, every time someone comes up with a mechanism showing how such a thing could have developed naturally, it falsifies that particular claim. A few hundred years ago there were many things in that category. Most of these things now have well-accepted natural explanations. On this basis, use of Intelligent Design has been repeatedly falsified, but only on a piecemeal basis. Taken in its entirety, there is no falsifiable mechanism that is used to demonstrate the plausibility of Intelligent Design. Either way, Intelligent Design loses. Either it has been repeatedly falsified, looking at past claims, or, looking at present claims, there is no component of the concept of the explanation that is falsifiable.
Anthropic Principle
The concept behind the Anthropic Principle is quite simple and contains no scientific content. It points out the truism that intelligent beings composed of matter will find themselves in environments where the processes necessary for their existence can take place. We have gone to space, the Moon, Antarctica and other hazardous places, but we have no evidence that beings such as we naturally exist in those places, or in even more forbidding places, such as the surface of the Sun or even that of Jupiter. Conceivably some other type of intelligent being might be in such a place, and, with sufficient artificial protection, we might visit such a place, but we don't expect to find aboriginals in any of these places - their bodies wouldn't function.
Likewise, when we look at the universe we find some characteristics that, on contemplation, seem odd. The oddest seems to be gravity, a simple force we are all familiar with. But, when compared with electricity, magnetism and various nuclear forces, it is unimaginably weak. I say unimaginably as a slight exaggeration, but I have trouble imagining the difference of forty factors of ten. When you next have trouble with static cling, consider that the electric forces of a some millions of electrons, a miniscule fraction of the garment, are successfully resisting the pull on the whole garment of the entire Earth which is valiantly trying to get the garment to hang correctly. Similar conditions act in a refrigerator magnet - the electric properties of a miniscule fraction of the mass of the magnet successful resist the pull of the entire Earth.
More along this line can be found in Just Six Number by Martin Rees. He points out several features of the universe which, were they much different, would have never resulted in conditions under which we could live.
This leads one to wonder if the universe we are in is the only possible one or if there might be others with, for example, different values of Rees' six numbers. That is pure speculation, of course - we have no evidence for such other universe.
All the Anthropic Principle says is, if there are a multitude of universes, we are going to find ourselves in one where the characteristics are such that we can exist.
It arises in discussion of Intelligent Design because some want to use the fact that we find ourselves in an environment so well suited to us as evidence that the characteristics were specifically chosen for the purpose. That conceivably could be the case, but the Anthropic Principle implies that the reasoning is bad - if the characteristics were chosen and chosen badly, we wouldn't find ourselves there to observe it.
I was trained as a physicist - my last formal biology lesson was in tenth grade. I have no intention of examining Behe's microbiology claims.
But, first, what does he present?
REVIEW
He starts out with some general biology facts and concepts and an introduction to Darwin's ideas and to evolution. "Evolution" covers a lot of ground. For this review, I'll distinguish three concepts and try to use the quoted phrases consistently:
"evolution" - the idea that genetic changes happen spontaneously for a number of reasons, and that those that improve an organism's chances of producing a viable next generation in a particular environment become more numerous over many generations are thereby selected by whatever environment does so.
"speciation" - the idea that through such processes and others, different branches might be selected by different environments and eventually become distinct from each other, resulting in different biological species.
"evolution-as-history" - the idea that the building blocks of life formed through natural processes and that all of the species that we experienced today developed naturally through evolution and speciation.
Behe discusses the basis for "evolution-as-history". Some discussions of this subject call it "Evolution" (with the capital E). He presents Darwin's concepts and the reasons for them. He stresses the concept that genetic changes are thought to occur in small amounts and that something results in some particular change being favored. Thus, he expects evolutionary change to occur in small steps. One step has to be favored to build up enough of a local population that some change in the new population can be favored in its turn.
He then presents three examples for which he gives compelling arguments why such a small step-by-step process could not have produced the result we see today. He calls these examples of "irreducible complexity". The biological mechanisms described have several interrelated components. If just one of these component fails to do its job, the whole mechanism fails. This is to be distinguished from other cases where, if one part fails, the overall mechanism might still work, but less effectively. In the examples of irreducible complexity that he presents, most of the parts have to work correctly or the complete mechanism fails. He points out that these are just three of a large number of examples that today have no established natural explanations
He mentions, briefly, some other natural processes that some have proposed as potential explanations, and rejects them.
He reports on a literature review to study progress in developing such explanations, and finds little reported effort and no progress.
He then presents Intelligent Design as the only reasonable explanation for these observed phenomena. (In the section Detection of Design he uses an unnoticed elephant in a room as an analogy - friends from the Bujold list would be reminded of "What's an elephant have to do around here, to advance and be recognized?".) He points out that Intelligent Design is not the same as Creationism (though the latter who reviewed this book were generally enthusiastic). The idea is that there are known areas in current biological knowledge where there is no good natural explanation to go from one established point to another. Behe's contention is that, for those cases involving irreducible complexity, there never will be such an explanation: the complexity exhibits the characteristics of having been designed - one should say so.
The last chapter is on Science, Philosophy, and Religion. He starts off this chapter - I'll quote from the start of the second paragraph: "The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell - to investigate life at the molecular level - is a loud, clear, piercing cry of 'design!' The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science." Obviously, not all agree, and he spends this chapter listing some human frailties in explanation. Since he doesn't seem to recognize what I consider to be one of the most important reasons we are reluctant to join his enthusiasm, I will stop the review here and go into critique. I'll close the review by repeating that the book is clear and well written. It is clearly not unbiased, but, then, neither are many of the reviews.
CRITIQUE
1. He states that there are several areas in tracing evolution-as-history where there is no established mechanism to jump gaps in the record. A big such area, of course, is at the beginning, but he chose three other examples. I grant this point.
2. In the examples he chose (and, I'm sure, many others) he sees no possible mode of explanation. Well, if he doesn't see a way, I'm not going to. I won't dispute this point, but others do. The bottom line is, however, at the moment the explanations don't exist.
3. In the examples he chose, the complexity invites the notion that the parts were brought together with intent - that there was Intelligent Design. I'll grant that that the notion presents itself. It seems that those who adopt the notion are mostly those who really want to.
So, why don't I and others agree with him?
First, the idea of Intelligent Design is hardly new. A few hundred years ago, it was routinely applied in those cases where people had no idea of what was going on. The revolution was that most of these cases could be given natural explanations. One reason Behe's elephant is being ignored is because it's been around forever - we thought we had persuaded it to stand quietly in the corner and contemplate moral and spiritual issues.
There are methods for extending natural knowledge. They work pretty well. They definitely have not discovered all natural knowledge. But they keep eating away at the fringes.
The biggest objection to declaring any one region of the physical world as due to Design is that it is tantamount to giving up on research in that region. (Of course, that is only an official giving up - some mavericks would keep trying despite stern department chairs and disapproving funding agencies.)
Historically, such regions have gotten smaller and smaller (compensated by new regions continually opening up). Whenever such region had been used as a basis for a particular faith, some fancy footwork was required when it turned out to be a natural phenomenon - that is one reason science and religion have set up the boundaries that most of us recognize.
Behe thinks that scientists are being irrational in their stubborn pursuit of natural explanations. He quotes Richard Dickerson as describing science as a game, where the rule is to find natural explanations without invoking the supernatural. He goes on to say that such a process rules out Intelligent Design by fiat. Behe seems to find this unfair.
There is this clear distinction, which Behe never mentions:
The explanations advanced by science are all based on processes that can be observed in nature and/or laboratories. We have not been successful in reliably demonstrating the existence of supernatural influences.
It is, as Behe maintains, true that there now exist many deep holes in the explanation chain for evolution-as-history. For those things for which plausible explanations exist, there are demonstrable natural processes to back them up. There is none of that for Intelligent Design. Behe argues that his opponents would never even consider Intelligent Design. I believe he is correct. If we had more reliable evidence of the supernatural working in the everyday world, I believe that would change. Until then, he has an empty complaint.
I haven't discussed Behe's reasons for inferring Intelligent Design in the first place. He invokes Paley's Intelligent Watchmaker argument and cleans it up a bit. I think the cleanup irrelevant. Basically, for someone who believes in a powerful Deity who directly effects changes in the natural world, invoking such a being as an Intelligent Designer is no great leap. For someone who either does not believe in such Deity, or who suspects that any such does not make a habit of directly affecting the natural world, then jumping from examples of complexity to infer the existence and interference of a Being immensely more complex for which no explanations at all exist is not logic at all - it is merely replacing one apparently intractable problem by another which is defined to be intractable and so one is excused from further scientific effort. Behe does not look at it in that way. His point is that these mechanisms are so complex that it looks like some intelligent agent designed them. If we don't happen to have a reasonable natural explanation at hand, we should assume that an intelligent agent did design them. The fact is that we have had such success in determining natural causes for natural phenomena that the appearance of some problems that are apparently intractable at present is not going to discourage most scientists. As Behe has observed.
CONTROVERSY
The controversy concerns whether or not to present Intelligent Design as a serious contender for the admittedly holey evolution-as-history theory. I have no objection to pointing out that evolution-as-history is not completely established, and that details may change. They certainly have throughout my lifetime. I have a fundamental objection to presenting any explanation involving the supernatural in public schools. In my opinion that violates the intent of the separation of church and state. (Behe explicitly relates "supernatural" and "higher intelligence" in his philosophy chapter.) I suspect that were my position to be agreed upon, there would still be controversy over how much to emphasize that evolution-as-history isn't all there yet. For some it is, "yeah, but it's just a matter of time" and for others it is "it's never going to happen - God works in mysterious ways". It is avoiding just this sort of controversy that we have the separation of church and state.
OTHER RESOURCES
You can create your own list with Google, but:
Kenneth Miller of Brown from Creation/Evolution. This is a good review, listing some of the book's strengths and giving a particular account of fossil records showing how one complex system did in fact evolve.
Keith Robison of Harvard Dept of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Talk.Origins. This includes a link to Behe responses. It also includes a link to a discussion of why Behe's mousetrap example is not irreducibly complex - other than illustrating that one can quibble about the definition, I don't see much point to that discussion.
Robert Dorit in American Scientist addresses some technical flaws in Behe's argument.
A Conversation with "Steve", identified as a molecular biologist and self-identified as a believer in reformed Christianity. This conversation is worth reading - it presents a viewpoint from a technically knowledgeable, devout person, and offers some criticism of the irreducible complexity argument as well as a perspective that is more from the center of this debate than from either of its fringes. I got the link from related
carbonelle posts here and here ; thank you.Ray Bohlin presents a view from Behe's support.
SOME RELATED ISSUES
Falsifiability
"Falsifiability" is an intrinsic part of what we consider to be meaningful theories. A theory should be able to make some particular prediction. One should then be able to construct an experiment to test the prediction. If the experiment is done and does not return the expected result, the theory is falsified. Of course, if the theory is well-accepted, there will be lots of discussion about how well the experiment was performed and interpreted, but that is the concept of how scientific theories are supposed to work.
Intelligent Design is criticized for not being falsifiable. Its supporters criticize evolution-as-history for not being falsifiable. Let's consider the second charge first, that evolution-as-history is not falsifiable. The charge has considerable merit. Whatever happened as history happened and almost all of the record is forever lost. The best that one can do to reconstruct history is to get as much of the record as possible and then spin plausible tales using mechanisms that are falsifiable. So falsification does get into the picture. The processes of evolution are very well established and are falsifiable. They are used to fill in the gaps of evolution-as-history. Behe and others point out quite rightly that, at the moment, not all of those gaps have been plausibly filled. But the process for filling them is quite clear - one must invoke mechanisms that can be falsified. It still does not produce a falsifiable evolution-as-history - we still will not know for sure what environments existed at what times. We may succeed in demonstrating that something could have occurred. In many cases it will be impossible to demonstrate that it did occur.
Back to Intelligent Design. One could say that parts are falsifiable. Behe is claiming that certain things are irreducibly complex and could only possibly have been designed. Well, every time someone comes up with a mechanism showing how such a thing could have developed naturally, it falsifies that particular claim. A few hundred years ago there were many things in that category. Most of these things now have well-accepted natural explanations. On this basis, use of Intelligent Design has been repeatedly falsified, but only on a piecemeal basis. Taken in its entirety, there is no falsifiable mechanism that is used to demonstrate the plausibility of Intelligent Design. Either way, Intelligent Design loses. Either it has been repeatedly falsified, looking at past claims, or, looking at present claims, there is no component of the concept of the explanation that is falsifiable.
Anthropic Principle
The concept behind the Anthropic Principle is quite simple and contains no scientific content. It points out the truism that intelligent beings composed of matter will find themselves in environments where the processes necessary for their existence can take place. We have gone to space, the Moon, Antarctica and other hazardous places, but we have no evidence that beings such as we naturally exist in those places, or in even more forbidding places, such as the surface of the Sun or even that of Jupiter. Conceivably some other type of intelligent being might be in such a place, and, with sufficient artificial protection, we might visit such a place, but we don't expect to find aboriginals in any of these places - their bodies wouldn't function.
Likewise, when we look at the universe we find some characteristics that, on contemplation, seem odd. The oddest seems to be gravity, a simple force we are all familiar with. But, when compared with electricity, magnetism and various nuclear forces, it is unimaginably weak. I say unimaginably as a slight exaggeration, but I have trouble imagining the difference of forty factors of ten. When you next have trouble with static cling, consider that the electric forces of a some millions of electrons, a miniscule fraction of the garment, are successfully resisting the pull on the whole garment of the entire Earth which is valiantly trying to get the garment to hang correctly. Similar conditions act in a refrigerator magnet - the electric properties of a miniscule fraction of the mass of the magnet successful resist the pull of the entire Earth.
More along this line can be found in Just Six Number by Martin Rees. He points out several features of the universe which, were they much different, would have never resulted in conditions under which we could live.
This leads one to wonder if the universe we are in is the only possible one or if there might be others with, for example, different values of Rees' six numbers. That is pure speculation, of course - we have no evidence for such other universe.
All the Anthropic Principle says is, if there are a multitude of universes, we are going to find ourselves in one where the characteristics are such that we can exist.
It arises in discussion of Intelligent Design because some want to use the fact that we find ourselves in an environment so well suited to us as evidence that the characteristics were specifically chosen for the purpose. That conceivably could be the case, but the Anthropic Principle implies that the reasoning is bad - if the characteristics were chosen and chosen badly, we wouldn't find ourselves there to observe it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 11:32 pm (UTC)"Separation of Church and State"?
Date: 2005-12-13 02:07 pm (UTC)(A fuller treatment of the metaphor is in the book: "Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State" by Daniel L. Dreisbach, reviewed by Joseph A. P. De Feo in _Catalyst_, March 2003, available here: http://www.catholicleague.org/research/dreisbach.htm).
Re: "Separation of Church and State"?
Date: 2005-12-13 02:47 pm (UTC)Nonetheless, I feel the problem posed by the difference in nature between Intelligent Design and any natural explanation is an extension of the problem Jefferson was trying to avoid. I agree: I doubt that the original framers would have seen it that way, and my wording was careless.
Re: "Separation of Church and State"?
Date: 2005-12-13 02:55 pm (UTC)http://www.catholicleague.org/research/dreisbach.htm
well, since you were nice enough to pay me a visit
Date: 2005-12-20 02:13 am (UTC)"In the examples he chose (and, I'm sure, many others) he sees no possible mode of explanation. ... The bottom line is, however, at the moment the explanations don't exist"
Explanations do exist for the various pieces of 'inexplicable design' in that and similar books. You can check out
Re: well, since you were nice enough to pay me a visit
Date: 2005-12-20 02:53 am (UTC)But, at a minimum, I was careless again - I should have specified "established explanations". And of course things may well have changed since the book came out and was reviewed. But since that would pretty much have killed his argument that no natural demonstrated explanation was possible for at least one of his examples, I would have thought we'd have heard more about it a few months ago when he was testifying. It would certainly have been a telling argument against his credibility as a witness in the PA trial.
As far as right background - right :<} . That's one reason I have been ignoring the matter until recently. But now that it has become a political issue, it is worth seeing whether there are applicable arguments that do not require microbiological expertise.
(first version didn't post right - 2d try)
Re: well, since you were nice enough to pay me a visit
Date: 2005-12-20 03:12 am (UTC)Re: well, since you were nice enough to pay me a visit
Date: 2005-12-20 06:09 am (UTC)To further clarify, for the purposes of the critique, I made no biological argument at all - I'm not competent. My assumption is that there is a wide collection of data that fits very well into the evolution-as-history model (Behe admits that) but that there are gaps here and there, and that some of these will be gaps because they are hard problems and might require more cleverness and data than we now possess. I anticipate that will be the case for a long time, and that somebody will be able to come up with some argument about why a particular missing link can't possibly be discovered. My point is, that until one can demonstrate something extra-natural in the lab here and now, one will always assume that the gaps in the historical record have natural explanations and continue to search for them.
Re: well, since you were nice enough to pay me a visit
Date: 2005-12-20 06:53 pm (UTC)1) Systems do not necessarily evolve bottom up. For example, a system with redundancies can evolve to lose some of the redundancy to become IC. Thus, an IC system can arise just as easily as a non-IC system.
2) When using the concept of IC, Behe (and the like) focus on one particular function. In reality, various stages of a biological mechanism are used for different things during the course of evolution. Just because a system would not be useful for function X if it had one fewer element does not mean it was not useful for function Y.
A more complete treatment is here, some specific counterexamples to Behe are here, and there's a page of relevant links here.
As to the God-of-the-gaps argument, you're right in that it's just as empty as it sounds.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 08:35 pm (UTC)For example, he talks of antibodies as being akin to toy darts that simply mark some foreign body, be it bacterium, or whatever, for phagocytosis.
Yes, nevermind that antibodies have been demonstrated to be able to perform many other things besides marking an intruder for phagocytosis by killer-cells. Like, for example, agglutination of viruses, like cold viruses, the neutralization of toxic materials (by having the antibodies agglutinate around it), or by killing the foreign or bad cell right then and there, either by activating apoptosis (like in a cancer cell), or by inhibiting some metabolic reaction (like in bacteria).
I'd rant more about his scientific ineptitude, but I just ate lunch.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 11:19 pm (UTC)heh :<) .
The worrisome thing is that this issue is being decided in part by people with little specialized information. Part of the challenge is making the argument in a way that depends as little as necessary on technical information, and that not only is balanced and fair but manifestly appears to be. I think that is one area where folks accustomed to dealing with peer review have a tough time adjusting.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 11:53 pm (UTC)Despite Pat Robertson's disproval.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-22 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-22 08:49 pm (UTC)