Re: Re: [asa] Review of Behe in Books and Culture

This is a model of good argument by Ted and Nick. Basically good natured and
thorough.

I have long thought that Mivart got a raw deal from both popes! Huxley and
his opposite number in the Vatican!! - He was excommunicated. My superficial
reading of him is that he was halfway between Gray and Behe.

Nick's comments on the age of the earth and the agnostics of it is what I
have been banging on about for 10 years.(see me on it on p 277 ff in
debating Design ed Ruse and Dembski). To be agnostic about the age of the
earth i.e geological time is as ridiculous as trying to do history and
ignoring a time line. It's like trying to discuss the War of Independence,
the civil way and the first and second world wars without taking into
account the actual dates. Before long we would have a dogfight between
Spitfires and Mustangs in the 1770s!!

I tried to explain all this to Angus Menuge over his testimony at Kansas in
2005 and that it meant his book Agents of Fire was pointless, as it was
arguing about divine agency in a timeless vacuum . The same applies to all
the discussion over the Cambrian explosion/fizzle which took place over
10-20 my.. I note that most writers on it avoid time.

Deep Time, geological and cosmological, gives us the chronology we need
before we can discuss any possibility of evolution. The sequence of events
and a timescale whether radiometric or the vague hundred or so my Darwin had
provides the hard historical data needed to start considering what may have
happened to life over time. Clearly if Ussher was right then evolution is
dead in the water(s of chaos). If time is vast then we need to explain the
sequence of the appearance of different forms of life over the last billion
years or so

Michael

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu>
To: <asa@lists.calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2007 2:45 PM
Subject: : Re: [asa] Review of Behe in Books and Culture

I forward the following lengthy and very thoughtful commentary from Nick
Matzke. Overall, Nick and I mainly disagree not on the facts or even on
what they point toward--we agree that nearly all IDs are OECs or YECs, and
that Behe's position is on the edge of ID. Where we continue to differ, I
sense, is in how we are defining what counts as TE and what does not. My
definition holds that anyone who believes in common descent is an
evolutionist, whether or not design can be scientifically detected (and
people who believe in design differ on whether or not the inference is
metaphysical, as I believe, or also scientific, as Mike Behe believes).
Thus, I put Behe and McCosh and Gray and Conway Morris all in the same
larger boat of TE (which is for me like ID a "big tent," including a
diversity of theological and metaphysical approaches), whereas I put
Dembski, Ross, Meyer, and Johnson in the OEC category and Nelson in the YEC
category. I also agree with Nick that Mivart is an interesting case, like
Behe in many ways. And, like Behe, the scientific establishment wanted to
distance itself from Mivart--Huxley was especially though on him, basically
slamming the door of scientific respectability on Mivart. Lehigh has been
kinder to Behe than Huxley was to Mivart.

Nick's brief comment about "agnostics" (relative to the earth's age) among
the IDs is more important than some may realize. To the best of my
knowledge, there are at least two prominent "agnostics" in this regard among
the IDs (Cornelius Hunter and Nancy Pearcey), and in recent years Phil
Johnson has started to sound and act like one. This for me is a very
frustrating view to encounter. How can one be agnostic about the age of the
earth/universe, while having overwhelming confidence in the science
supporting "design"? The latter is based mainly on what we still don't
know, scientifically--at least the way in which it usually comes across to
me--whereas no one IMO can reasonably claim that we don't know how old the
earth and universe are, at least in terms of its order of magnitude. The
YEC position of someone like Nelson (the universe presently looks very old,
but the Bible says it isn't, so let's believe the Bible and hope for future
discoveries that will be more consistent with a young earth) makes more
sense to me than the agnosticism of some other IDs.

Ted

>>> Nick Matzke <matzke@ncseweb.org> 7/11/2007 11:45 PM >>>
Hi Ted,

(This turned into a mini-essay. Feel free to
post to ASA if you see fit. I may post it to PT at some point.)

IS BEHE A THEISTIC EVOLUTIONIST?

Thanks for fwding your discussion. While I would
agree that Behe's new book gives you a somewhat
stronger case than before for Behe being a TE, I
still think he's basically arguing for
supernatural intervention, i.e. miracles, to be
not just real events e.g. in the New Testament,
but scientifically detectable events that can be
invoked as causes in science. If Behe's view won
out, people would be publishing articles that
said "such and such microevolved to this point,
then a miracle occurred to assemble 6 mutations
at once and create two new protein-protein
binding sites." In my view, the difference
between this and other forms of creationism is a matter of degree, not of
kind.

Behe attempts to obfuscate the supernatural
intervention point a bit in "Edge of Evolution",
but as far as I can tell his only alternative is
to postulate "front-loading", which for him
apparently means something akin to a multiple
universes model, where a Designer picks the right
universe every time there is a relevant quantum
event that might go one way or the other way to
produce the right mutation or not. If anything
this is even more metaphysically ostentatious
than a simple miracle. (And I would say this
about those who invoke infinite universes to
explain allegedly improbable events on the
atheist side also. Such moves are no better than miracles IMHO.)

Also, if Behe wants to be seen as a TE he really
shouldn't write books with titles like "The Edge of Evolution."

I think what is really going on is that, as
usual, Behe is trying to have his cake and eat it
too. He knows anyone denying common ancestry
will just get written off in serious
circles. Darwin's Black Box, and to some extent
ID, got more serious attention in the 1990s than
previous forms of creationism, under the
perception that ID was OK with common ancestry
and therefore wasn't necessarily completely
silly. Later it emerged that, well, really, most
of that was bogus and almost everyone in the ID
movement except Behe denies common ancestry
flat-out and is therefore a straight-up
creationist (old earth, young earth, or,
suprisingly commonly, agnostic earth) no matter
how you slice it. This point was made with great
force recently in Kansas, Dover, etc. -- in
Kitzmiller v. Dover, Behe was stuck arguing that
ID was OK with common ancestry, even though
Pandas, a book Behe coauthored, repeatedly and
explicitly denied common ancestry
(http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day11pm2.html#day11pm623
). So I think that in order to get another bite
at the serious attention, Behe emphasized common
ancestry more strongly in "Edge of Evolution."

On the other hand, notice what Behe didn't
do. He didn't come out and say the things that
scientific responsibility really demands, e.g.:
that the denial of the old earth and/or common
ancestry are some of the greatest frauds of the
20th & 21st century, and that the shame of the
fraud is compounded by the fact that it has been
perpetuated on the gullible folks in the pews by
their religious leadership, and via political
action through the public schools, and that it is
especially shameful that the ID movement hides
its views on these topics, or often actively
promotes the fraudulent view, rather than, say,
educating the religious leadership about the facts of life.

Instead, he has recently written things like this
(from First Things, December 2005):

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=267
===============================
Even now, I am sometimes singled out by
Darwinists as the most "reasonable" Intelligent
Design proponent, because I've written that I
think common descent is true. I'm embarrassed to
admit that I derive some odd, involuntary
pleasure from being thought the "best" of the
lot. My reaction is especially irrational because
some of my Intelligent Design colleagues who
disagree with me on common descent have greater
familiarity with the relevant science than I do.

(Reference: p. 19 of Michael Behe (2005).
"Scientific Orthodoxies." First Things 158, pp. 15-20. December 2005.)
===============================

...and this, in response to a letter replying to
the December '05 piece, from a young-earth creationist...

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=94
===============================
I appreciate Jackie Lee's and Carmen Catanese's
letters, which together help to illustrate the
breadth of freedom available to a Christian
interpreting the physical evidence of nature. The
danger to Christians from osmosing alien,
materialistic presumptions, I think, far
outweighs the danger of being wrong about any particular scientific point.

(Behe in First Things, March 2006)
===============================

Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical about Behe being a serious evolutionist.

I mentioned Behe "having his cake and eating it
too" in The Edge of Evolution. If one thinks
that young-earth creationists or old-earth
creationists are deeply concerned about logic and
consistency, one might think that they would see
Behe's book in a negative light. But ain't
necessarily so -- many creationists have trained
themselves to see the world through a one-way
filter, such that anything they like -- such as
Behe's arguments against evolution -- they adopt
whole-heartedly, and anything they don't like --
such as Behe's endorsement of common ancestry --
they just shrug off almost without
blinking. They've been doing it for decades with
everyone from Velikovsky to Hoyle & Wickramasinge
to Alan Feduccia. Why should Behe be any
different. As long as he throws some mud at
mainstream evolutionary theory the creationists will love it.

Here's a handy example, a young-earth creationist
reviewing Behe's book at amazon.com a few days ago:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0743296206/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary/104-6158637-2927920?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books#customerReviews
===============================
Michael Behe is certainly not (yet) a Young Earth
biblical creationist. However, in my view he ends
up making a powerful argument for instant (and
recent) creation. I will only sketch the reasons
that lead me to say that. One must start by
saying that although he speaks about common
ancestry, the arguments he puts forward to
support it are actually not very strong, and are
to a large extent compatible with the concept of
a common Creator. Young Earth creationists deal
with this subject at length. What's more, Michael
Behe makes the important point that the creation
of the simplest forms of new three protein
interactions is totally beyond the edge of evolution.

In doing so, Michael Behe gives strong support to
the idea according to which to create life, along
with the different classes of functional plants
and animals, of incredible complexity,
integration and fine-tuning, one needs huge
amounts of theoretical information and practical ability. Scientists lack
both.

All the different parts have to be in the right
place, at the right time, with the right shape,
in the right amounts to perform the right tasks.
In my view, this does away with billions of years
of random or non-random evolution and speaks
loudly about instant, careful and precise creation, jusk like the Bible
states.
===============================

IS BEHE LIKE ASA GRAY?

As for the question of who Behe is like: he might
be like Asa Gray, but this is a complex question
because mutation & variation were mysterious in
Gray's day. Today, mutation is a well-understood
chemical process, and sticking the supernatural
in there is just as odd as doing it in
meteorology or seismology or anything else where
the basic physical processes are quite well
understood but the enormous complexity of the
systems means that exact reconstruction is
impossible. At times Gray seemed to be arguing
for a divine guidance for mutation as far as I
can tell, but on the other hand Gray expressed
quite strongly a preference for methodological
naturalism where natural processes were
available. And a huge amount depends on what
exactly Gray meant by "guidance." Behe clearly
takes it in a strong sense, i.e. divine
intervention is scientifically detectable and
ought to be able to be invoked in science. If
Gray thought variability was guided by God, like
the weather was guided by God, i.e. God acts
through natural processes, then that is a difference between Gray and Behe.

Behe is definitely not like the theistic
evolutionists of today, e.g. Ken Miller, Simon
Conway Morris, etc. E.g. Conway Morris doesn't
argue God is guiding mutations, rather he is a
strong selectionist, like Richard Dawkins --
selection dominates mutation in other words,
converging on the same basic organismal solution
repeatedly despite entirely different mutational
pathways and entirely different resulting DNA
sequences. The big difference between Conway
Morris and Dawkins is metaphysical. Dawkins
thinks the capabilities of natural processes
disprove God, whereas, Conway Morris thinks the
capabilities show that the Universe is set up
such that natural laws, including selection, will
eventually produce humanlike intelligence. Behe,
on the other hand, is arguing for the incapability of natural processes.

I suspect that Behe is actually channeling
Mivart, with whom he shares numerous other
similarities, but I haven't had a chance to dig into Mivart thoroughly.

BEHE'S STATISTICAL ARGUMENT

Finally, the only really important question about
Behe's new book is whether or not his statistical
arguments have any validity. If not, the details
of Behe's extremely vague alternative(s) to
normal mutation are moot. And I have to report
that Behe's statistics aren't just bad, they are
laughable and horrible, on the level of the
crudest YEC statistical arguments. Although that
review of Behe in Christianity Today/Books &
Culture wasn't too bad on the philosophy, it
swallowed Behe's statistics whole.

I have written a book review of Behe's argument
for TREE (Trends in Ecology in Evolution) --
probably it won't be out until the fall. But
here is the short version (I reply to the Books &
Culture summary of Behe's argument, which is a good summary):

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/004/9.38.html
===============================
Behe acknowledges that it would be legitimate to
wonder if he was "just countering Dawkins'
suppositions" with his own. After all, comparing
malarial cells with or without resistance to
chloroquine to cities with or without bridges is
quite a stretch. So we must go to the numbers,
since that's ultimately where the battle is to be fought.

It took two chance mutations for malaria to
develop a resistance to chloroquine. The protein
in the malarial cell that provides resistance has
424 amino acids. The two changes required were at
the 76th and 220th positions.
===============================

Actually, this is wrong. Full-blown chloroquine
resistance (CQR) is much more complex than 2
mutations, but other resistance alleles are known
with various combinations of 1, 2, 3, 4
mutations, and resistance alleles don't always
have Behe's 2 mutations. So Behe is wrong in
several ways right from the start of his calculations.

===============================
So how long did it take for malaria to develop
such a defense against modern science? Between
thirty to forty years. Score one for evolution.
But how many cells had to be sorted through
before evolution stumbled upon this defense?
100,000,000,000,000,000,000. In scientific
notation that's 1020. (For comparison, the number
of seconds that have elapsed since the Big Bang
15 billion years ago is about 1019!) Let's call this round a draw.
===============================

Behe pulled the 10^20 number (allegedly the
number of parasites required to evolve CQR) from
an offhand estimate in the literature. The
estimate was actually a count of the number of
times that full-blown CQR had been detected in
different regions around the world. This is a
count of the very few alleles that "won" when
natural selection swept them to dominance in a
regional population, such that doctors detected
them. This ignores all of the weaker CQR alleles
that originated and then were outcompeted by the
few winners, or which themselves mutated into the
winner by additional mutations.

Basically it's as if Behe judged the frequency of
people who could run the 100 meter dash in under
20 seconds, by counting only the living winners
of the Olympic gold medal in the 100 meter dash (~10 seconds). Big mistake.

Returning to Behe's argument:

===============================
But now consider the construction, not the
destruction, of protein machinery. "Generating a
single new cellular protein-protein binding site
is of the same order of difficulty or worse than
the developmentof chloroquine resistance in the malarial parasite."
===============================

Here, Behe is also wrong for several reasons.

1. As noted above, full CQR is more complex than
2 mutations, so there is no reason to think that
protein-protein binding sites (which often
involve 3-6 key residues) are more complex than CQR

2. And anyway Behe gives no real reasons to think
that the evolution of protein-protein binding
sites require 3+ multiple simultaneous mutations
anyway -- in real life, step-by-step point
mutations can alter binding specificity gradually
and produce a binding site. Binding is a
quantitative trait, point mutations can and do move it up and down.

3. And even if we ignore #1 and #2, and assume
against evidence that protein-protein binding
sites actually are more complex than CQR, the 1
in 10^20 estimate for the probability of CQR
binding was bogus in the first place.

===============================
Now simple math demonstrates that if the odds of
rolling a single 6 on a six-sided die are one in
6, then the odds of rolling two 6's in a row are
6 squared or one in 36. So if the odds of a
single protein binding site are 1020, then the
odds of having two binding sites (i.e., a
three-protein bond), where all three proteins are
necessary to do what they were intended to do, are 1040.
===============================

Here again, Behe just assumes this. He gives no
reasons in his book for why two binding sites
would have to evolve *at once* anywhere in actual
real-life evolution, which is the only reason you
would multiple 10^20 by 10^20 to get 10^40
required organisms. In real life, evolution
would most commonly evolve one binding site for
one function, then the complex would sit around
doing its function for awhile, and then
occasionally another protein would evolve binding
for some other function, or for improving the
current function. It's called exaptation --
change of function in evolution -- and it has
been absolutely fundamental in evolutionary
theory ever since Darwin. And lest someone think
I am just making up stories, analysis of the
flagellum, the immune system, etc. has shown that
they can be broken down into subsystems that have
alternative functions, despite having only some
of the parts but not all of them (and also having
some of the binding sites but not all of
them). Behe's view of cooption/exaptation is
always all-at-once assembly: a bunch of different
individual proteins have to evolved together all
at once to form a functioning complex. But
subcomplexes prove that it doesn't have to happen
all at once. Behe ignores this in "Edge of Evolution", as usual.

===============================
How should we score this round? Before answering,
consider this: the sum total of bacterial cells
that have existed on earth during its entire
history has yet to reach 1040. Here's Behe's
conclusion: "Admittedly, statistics are all about
averages, so some freak event like this might
happen*it's not ruled out by force of logic. But
it is not biologically reasonable to expect it *
. In short, complexes of just three or more
different proteins are beyond the edge of
evolution." In other words, if it's alive and
smaller than a cell, then science is pretty much
clueless concerning its origin.
===============================

And now we see why ID is commonly and rightly
reviled by the scientific community. Bogus,
poorly-thought out pseudo-statistical puffery is
uncritically accepted as some great big problem
for evolution...yet again. The CT reviewer makes
some interesting philosophical comments, but
didn't bother to even try to critically examine
the key points of Behe's argument.

So anyway, "The Edge of Evolution" is just
another variant on lame old creationism in my
view. Behe's real problem is not that he has a
well-thought-out scientific objection to
evolution, it's that he views "randomness" as a
metaphysical problem for his worldview. He
thinks if "randomness" is "real" then God, or at
least cosmic purposefulness or a caring God,
can't exist. But instead of attacking the
metaphysics of Monod or someone who actually did
advocate this metaphysical view of randomness
(science in general does not -- "random" in
science is just a statistical statement of
uncertainty, nothing more), Behe tries to solve a
metaphysical problem by attacking mundane
evolutionary theory's concept of "random
mutation." If he thought about it, he would
realize that the real randomness-lovers in
science are the atmospheric scientists, who
invoke statistical "random processes" every
chance they get in models of precipitation, wind,
etc. But no, it's evolution-bashing that is the tradition in the U.S.

Cheers!
Nick

PS: References for my key assertions are in the
TREE review but I don't want to just shoot off
all my ammo before it is published. Since Behe
provides virtually no support for his key
premises, just pointing out how they are dubious is sufficient for a web
post.

==================================
Nicholas J. Matzke
Public Information Project Director
National Center for Science Education, Inc.
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Fax: (510) 601-7204
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matzke@ncseweb.org
bio: http://www.ncseweb.org/ourstaff.asp#matzke

National Center for Science Education
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Received on Fri Jul 13 16:02:41 2007