Re: [asa] Behe Responds To Ken Miller - Edge of Evolution

I note with interest Behe's accusation that Miller cites sources as
authority that don't really stand for the proposition cited: Behe says, *Now,
dear reader, when Miller writes of "protein-to-protein" binding sites in one
sentence, wouldn't you expect the papers he cites in the next sentence would
be about protein-to-protein binding sites? Well — although the casual reader
wouldn't be able to tell — they aren't. None of the papers Miller cites
involves protein-protein binding sites.
*
Now, forgive me if I start to sound like Phil Johnson a bit here, but as a
lawyer, this is a tactic I know well. People often cite cases as
authorities in legal briefs that, on careful reading, don't really support
that party's position. Often this is a result of laziness, not malice, but
it's also done as a way of "padding" a list of authorites to make it look
more impressive. Being a good lawyer at an excellent, well staffed firm, I
used to relish actually reading the other side's citations and then hoisting
them on their own petards.

And, it seems to me, Miller and others have done this before. I often see a
list of papers cited as evidence that science has found an evolutionary
pathway for the bacterial flagellum. On close examination, if you actually
read the papers, they are a disjointed collection of studies that hint at
something here or there.

None of this is to say that, at the end of the day, Behe is right. Yet,
much as we rightly decry the bad and nasty arguments in places like Uncommon
Descent, I wonder if we should also recognize that the vehemently anti-ID
crowd is playing exactly, exactly the same game. It is unfortunately a
"culture war" issue not only because of the ID side, but also because of the
tactics of the anti-ID side.

John T -- I don't think you're getting at the same thing Behe is saying
here. Behe says an IC system is one in which the removal of one part will
collapse the system. Behe says Miller represents that an IC system is one
in which the parts of the system can't be used for any other purpose. Thus,
Miller claims to have falsified IC by showing that the parts of a putatively
IC system could be used for another purpose, in a different system. This is
the "cooption" argument -- the IC system could arise through the cooption of
its parts from other systems. Behe says that is not a falsification of IC
at all; whether the parts can have functions in other systems doesn't
matter; one still has to show how the incomplete IC system would function as
it coopts parts, or how the IC system could spontaneously coopt all the
parts at once into a working system. Angus Menuge makes some interesting
arguments about this in his book "Agents Under Fire."

Again -- not to say Behe is necessarily right, but this does illustrate, I
think, how the sides often argue past each other for rhetorical points
rather than engaging in meaningful debate.

On 7/13/07, Jon Tandy <tandyland@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> One thing that I find about this type of discussion on ID, maybe on the
> science of creation in general, the more explicitly scientific the
> discussion becomes, the further it gets from comprehensibility by the
> average lay reader. In particular, in order to make ID more acceptable to
> the scientific community, Behe has to necessarily employ arguments that can't
> possibly be evaluated by the general public, and the same with any critiques
> and counter-critiques. Is it any wonder that there remains a gap between
> the "simple believing folk" who choose to simply "accept the Bible account",
> and those who try to contextualize it in a scientific framework?
>
> But one question about the article below, in one of the few
> counter-arguments that I can even begin to understand, in the last paragraph
> Behe complains that Ken Miller has redefined what Behe meant by "irreducibly
> complex" as a straw man argument. Behe defines it as a system which has had
> a part removed, Ken Miller is looking for a system where other parts have
> some function. This seems specious to me. Behe is defining it backwards --
> you don't get evolution by taking a full system and removing a part (well
> maybe in some cases, but not in this context). You start with parts,
> presumably, and obtain a working system. Therefore, looking at it the right
> way around, Behe appears to mean that an IC system couldn't exist and
> function with one or some of its parts undeveloped, because the parts don't
> cause the organism to "live long and prosper" until they are all assembled.
> The logical counter-argument to that is to show, even though the final
> system has not been fully assembled, the organism can survive because the
> parts have other beneficial functions in the organism. This seems to be
> Miller's definition, which it seems to me to be a logical approach to
> falsifying Behe's hypothesis.
>
> Am I missing something here?
>
> Jon Tandy
> <http://www.arcom.com/>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> *From:* asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] *On
> Behalf Of *(Matthew) Yew Hock Tan
> *Sent:* Friday, July 13, 2007 4:50 AM
> *To:* asa@calvin.edu
> *Subject:* [asa] Behe Responds To Ken Miller - Edge of Evolution
>
> Response to Kenneth R. Miller<http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK1WNX2AI5EMGXN>
>
>

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Received on Fri Jul 13 08:30:55 2007