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

Dave, I took a peek at your article. If I understand it right, the
"anti-IC" paper you're summarizing shows how one IC system evolved into two
separate IC systems in a particular line of organisms. Is that right?

If that's a fair summary, it is quite an interesting discovery, but it seems
to me that it doesn't do much damage to Behe's basic position. After all,
you still have to start with the precursor IC system. Apparently, nothing
in the summarized paper suggests a gradualistic pathway to that
*original*IC system. So, I would imagine an IC advocate spinning it
this way:
*"sure, once you have an IC system, it might be possible to break it into
equally IC sub-systems; another fascinating property of IC that shows the
intelligence of the designer."*

Note that I'm not disagreeing with your overall conclusion necessarily, but
maybe I'm missing why 1 IC system >> 2 IC systems defeats the entire notion
of IC or suggests that the originally IC system could have arisen only by
natural selection.

BTW -- I'd also like to see the ant-ID crowd's response to the teleological
conclusion you draw from the Weinreich study. I'm guessing it would be
lumped right along with IC arguments.

Dave O. (ASA Member)

On 7/13/07, D. F. Siemens, Jr. <dfsiemensjr@juno.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
>

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Received on Fri Jul 13 16:32:40 2007