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

On the construction of an IC system, see my "News and Views" in the
September 2006 PSCF.
Dave (ASA)

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:30:21 -0400 "David Opderbeck"
<dopderbeck@gmail.com> writes:
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.
 

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Fri Jul 13 15:50:11 2007