On Wed, 12 Feb 1997 16:02:32 -0500, John W. Burgeson wrote:
JB>I, for one, think the poll was a good idea. It allowed us an
>opportunity to talk about how we use this very valuable resource.
Except the person who it was about was not invited to the "talk"!
>JB>Having said this, I'll add I've heard about all I want to hear on
>the subject! As one who has benefited from both Brian and Steve's
>posts in the past, and who expects to continue benefiting in the
>future, can I ask all players to "step back" and remind ourselves
>that it is Christ whom we represent here, not ourselves, and that
>debate opponents are not enemies!
Indeed. With such "opponents" who needs "enemies"! :-) But Brian's
poll has clarified in my own mind that we are indeed "opponents".
>JB>I've been on discussion e-mail groups since the early 80s (at that
>time on an internal IBM system); these are not new matters, afterall
>-- we are forging out new cultures -- almost every
>reflector/LISTSERV I am now on or ever have been on seems to develop
>its own -- and that's OK.
Good point.
>JB>I voted "no abuse" because I've seen the real thing. It is not
>pretty.
Thanks Burgy.
>JB>I really appreciate all the "players" in this sandbox -- those I
>agree with and those I do not. You enrich my understanding. Hope I
>can share some "goodies" with you from the upcoming UT conference!
What's the "UT conference"?
>JB>Oh yes -- Phil Johnson mentioned to me yesterday (we were talking
>about the conference and a bit of "Phil-bashing" that was going on
>in my Compuserve forum) that setting your web search engine to the
>phrase "BostonReview" picks up an interesting current origins
>controversy.
Thanks for the tip Burgy.
I found this at http://www-polisci.mit.edu/bostonreview/
by Mike Behe clarifiying his position. This is my favourite for
obvious reasons:
"Coyne complains the book is "heavily larded" with quotations from
evolutionists. This leads into his being upset with being quoted
himself, as discussed above. That aside, however. I don't know what
to make of this statement. What is a book concerning evolution
supposed to contain if not quotes from evolutionists? Quotes from
accountants?"
-----------------------------------------------------------
Reply to my critics
Michael Behe
Boston Review
My thanks to the Boston Review for publishing my reply to Allen Orr's
review of my book. I would like to address the main points of
several critics in the symposium who, I believe, have mistaken
notions of what I am arguing.
Allen Orr
Professor Orr has a mistaken notion of irreducible complexity. I
thought I made that clear in my reply, but from his response I
suppose I did not, so let me try again. I define irreducible
complexity in Darwin's Black Box as "a single system composed of
several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic
function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the
system to effectively cease functioning." Orr, however, uses the
term loosely to mean something like "if you remove a part, the
organism will die." In his review he talks about lungs, saying "we
grew thoroughly terrestrial and lungs, consequently, are no longer
luxuries-they are essential." The problem is, if you quickly dissect
lungs from an animal, many parts of it will continue to work. The
liver will work for a while, muscles will twitch, cells will
metabolize until they run out of oxygen. Thus lungs are not
absolutely required for the function of those other parts, not in the
way that a spring is absolutely required for a standard mousetrap or
nexin linkers are required for ciliary function. That's the problem
with using poorly chosen examples, especially at the whole-organ
level. I am careful in my book (pp. 46-47) to say that you must
look at molecular systems to see if Darwinism can explain their
development. When you look at irreducibly complex molecular
examples, it is clear that Darwinism has not and, I believe, cannot
explain them. Orr's main line of argument, therefore, simply misses
the point.
I should also point out that, contrary to Professor Orr's assertion,
we do not know that swim bladders evolved into lungs by natural
selection. There is absolutely no evidence for it. It may be likely
that lungs are descended from swim bladders, but no experiment has
indicated that natural selection can do the trick. In fact, no one
even knows at the nuts-and-bolts molecular level what it would take.
Orr simply assumes it is possible because he is not bothering with
the myriad molecular difficulties that would face such a
transformation.
Orr says that the parts of a mousetrap might have started out as
something else, and then were changed into their current parts. I
address this type of argument on page 66 of Darwin's Black Box.
Essentially this approach doesn't help. The parts still have to be
adjusted to each other at some stage, and they still don't work until
all the parts have been so adjusted. That requires intelligent
activity.
Orr says we know mousetraps are designed because we have seen them
being designed by humans, but we have not seen irreducibly complex
biochemical systems being designed, so we can't conclude they were.
I discuss this on pp. 196-197. We apprehend design from the system
itself, even if we don't know who the designer is. For example, the
SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scans space
for radio waves that might have been sent by aliens. However, we
have never observed aliens sending radio messages; we have never
observed aliens at all. Nonetheless, SETI workers are confident, and
I agree, that they can detect intelligently-produced phenomena, even
if they don't know who produced them. Orr's criterion is also
subject to a reductio ad absurdum. Suppose we flew to an alien
planet and observed a deserted city. Orr's position would hold that
we can't conclude the city was designed, because we have never seen
aliens producing cities, and he would oblige us to search for an
unintelligent cause for the manifestly designed city.
Orr finds it "extremely curious" that I think some systems could
evolve by natural selection, but that others couldn't. I discuss
this on pp. 205-208. Simply put, some systems are more complex than
others, irreducibly so. If one biochemical system looks pretty much
like the other to Orr, then he isn't going to see any problems.
However, if you attend to the details of each system, as I tried to
do, difficulties for Darwinism loom at many places.
Phillip Johnson can fight his own battles, but I'd just like to say I
think it odd that Orr jumps on Johnson for an understandable
confusion of terms. Orr seems to think that the essence of
explanation is in knowing the labels that evolutionists have put on
concepts, rather than on whether the concepts actually explain how
life got here. It is especially odd when Orr gives no indication of
understanding much about the molecular basis of life, where all the
inheritable action necessarily takes place.
Jerry A. Coyne
Professor Coyne seems really to have been traumatized by being quoted
in my book (page 29). He should relax. My purpose in quoting him
and others was to show that many thoughtful biologists found
Darwinism to be an incomplete theory of life. I did not say that
Coyne or the others agreed with intelligent design. Indeed, for
several of the people I quoted (Stuart Kauffman and Lynn Margulis) I
specifically discuss their alternative theories to Darwinism. I
start off the section by saying "A raft of evolutionary biologists
examining whole organisms wonder just how Darwinism can account for
their observations." After a few other people, I quote Coyne as
saying, "We conclude˜unexpectedly˜that there is little evidence for
the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the
experimental evidence supporting it are weak." In Coyne's paper, the
sentence did not stop there; it continued with "and there is no doubt
that mutations of large effect are sometimes important in
adaptation." I do not see, however, where that changes the sense of
the sentence at all. In my manuscript I had his quote ending with an
ellipsis, but the copy editor took out all ellipses in this section
and put in periods, so I assume that it is in keeping with standard
editorial practices. It is extremely difficult for me to understand
why Coyne thinks his idea is anything other than a doubt about the
efficacy of Darwinism, or what context could possibly change its
plain meaning. Coyne goes on to quote the entire paragraph in which
the sentence appeared, but that changes nothing of the basic thrust
as far as I can see.
Coyne says my book bears the four marks of "crank science", which I
will address in turn:
1) Coyne says I did not present my views "directly to the scientific
community." Free Press sent my book out to a number of scientists
for their review. One angrily told Free Press not to publish because
he viewed intelligent design theory as "giving up." Three said they
thought the book meritorious and worthy of publication, although they
did not agree with my conclusion of intelligent design. One
scientist thought the book worthy of publication, and thought that
intelligent design was possibly true. Additionally, my book was put
up for competitive bidding, and several university presses were
interested. They were outbid by Free Press.
2) Coyne complains that if one biochemical pathway is explained by
natural selection, intelligent design advocates can just move on to
another, and so ID is not falsifiable. This complaint would have
some merit if Darwinists had explained any complex biochemical
system. I can't speak for others, but for myself if I were convinced
that natural selection could explain a system of a certain degree of
complexity, then I would assume it could explain other systems of a
similar or lesser degree of complexity. However, to date it has not
been able to explain the origins of functional systems of much
complexity at all.
3) Coyne says Behe "likens himself to Newton, Einstein, and Pasteur."
I do not. I clearly acknowledge that the credit belongs to the
scientific community as a whole, whose cumulative work makes design
apparent. Here are some relevant sentences from pages 232-233:
"The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell˜to
investigate life at the molecular level˜is a loud, clear, piercing
cry of Œdesign!' The result is so unambiguous and so significant
that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the
history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and
Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur and Darwin.... The
magnitude of the victory, gained at such great cost through sustained
effort over the course of decades, would be expected to send
champagne corks flying in labs around the world. This triumph of
science should evoke cries of "Eureka" from ten thousand throats,
should occasion much hand-slapping and high-fiving, and perhaps even
be an excuse to take a day off.... Why does the scientific community
not greedily embrace its startling discovery?"
It does not take a rocket scientist to see design; the hard work was
in the day-in, day-out elucidation of the molecular workings of the
cell. For someone who is as touchy as he is to possible
misinterpretation, Coyne seems not to mind putting a strained
interpretation on other people's writing.
4) Coyne complains the book is "heavily larded" with quotations from
evolutionists. This leads into his being upset with being quoted
himself, as discussed above. That aside, however. I don't know what
to make of this statement. What is a book concerning evolution
supposed to contain if not quotes from evolutionists? Quotes from
accountants?
Russell F. Doolittle
Professor Doolittle is a prominent scientist, a member of the
National Academy of Sciences who has worked hard on many aspects of
protein structure over the course of a distinguished career. He
knows more about the process of blood clotting, and more about the
relationships among the protein members of the clotting cascade, then
perhaps anyone else on earth. He does not, however, know how natural
selection could have produced the clotting cascade. In fact, he has
never tried to explain how it could have. Nonetheless, as reflected
in his comments in Boston Review, he clearly thinks he has addressed
the question. This results from a basic confusion, which I will try
to clarify.
As Professor Doolittle points out, the sequence of amino acids in one
protein might be strikingly like that in a second protein. A good
example is the one he gives us˜the different subunits of hemoglobin.
This gave rise to the idea that the similar proteins might have
descended from a common gene, when in the past the gene was
duplicated. Virtually all biochemists accept this, and so do I. Many
proteins of the clotting cascade are similar to each other, and
similar to other non-cascade proteins, so they also appear to have
arisen by some process of gene duplication. I think this is a very
good hypothesis too. The critical point, however, is that the
duplicated gene is simply a copy of the old one, with the same
properties as the old one˜it does not acquire sophisticated new
properties simply by being duplicated. In order to understand how
the present day system got here, a scientist has to explain how the
duplicated genes acquired their new, sophisticated properties.
With hemoglobin the task of getting from a simple protein with one
chain to a complex of four chains does not appear to present
problems, as I discussed on pp. 206-207 of Darwin's Black Box. In
both cases the proteins simply bind oxygen, with more or less
affinity, and they don't have to interact critically with other
proteins in a complex protein system. There is a fairly obvious
pathway leading from a simple hemoglobin to a more complex one.
With the proteins of blood clotting, however, the task of adding
proteins to the cascade appears to be horrendously problematic. With
one protein acting on the next, which acts on the next, and so forth,
duplicating a given protein doesn't give you a new step in the
cascade. Both copies of the duplicated protein will have the same
target protein which they activate, and will themselves be activated
by the same protein as before. In order to explain how the cascade
arose, therefore, a scientist has to propose a detailed route whereby
a duplicated protein turns into a new step in the cascade, with a new
target, and a new activator. Furthermore, because clotting can
easily go awry and cause severe problems when it is uncontrolled, a
serious model for the evolution of blood clotting has to include
quantitative factors, such as how much of a clot forms, what pressure
it can resist, how frequent inappropriate clots would be, and many,
many more such questions.
Professor Doolittle has addressed none of these questions. He has
confined his work to the question of what proteins appear to be
descended from what other proteins, and is content to wave his hands
and assert that, well, those systems must have been put together by
natural selection somehow. The title of the reference to his work
that he cites here says it all, "Reconstructing the history of
vertebrate blood coagulation from a consideration of the amino acid
sequences of clotting proteins." His work concerns sequence
comparisons. Doolittle has no idea of whether the clotting cascade
could have been built up by natural selection.
I argue that each of the steps of the clotting cascade is irreducibly
complex (see Chapter 4 of my book)˜requiring the rearrangement of
several components simultaneously before a viable, controlled
clotting system could be in place, and that is why I conclude that
the cascade is a product of design. Clotting factors may be related
by common descent, but the clotting cascade was not produced by
natural selection.
On a different note, I'm glad Professor Doolittle likes Rube Goldberg
too, but unfortunately it supplies what I think is his rock-bottom
reason for deciding that natural selection produced the clotting
cascade: "... no Creator would have designed such a circuitous and
contrived system." Well, Doolittle is a good scientist, but he's no
theologian, and he doesn't serve science well when he lets his
theological presuppositions influence his scientific judgment.
Douglas J. Futuyma
Professor Futuyma advances arguments that I have dealt with in my
replies to Orr and Doolittle: a mistaken notion of what constitutes
irreducible complexity, and a confusion of what gene duplication is
able to explain. He also offers a polemic saying that I "claim a
miracle in every molecule" and "Behe invites us to give up." I do
not, however, claim to see miracles˜I see design. Design and
intelligence are two phenomena of which we have direct experience;
they are parts of the world we see every day. On the other hand, the
ability of natural selection to produce complex molecular systems
resides only in the mind of Futuyma and others. Far from giving up,
intelligent design theory takes the world as we see it, without
philosophical preconceptions. Futuyma concludes, however, that the
world must have behaved in a way we have never seen it behave, all to
fit his extrascientific views.
Michael Ruse Professor Ruse asks if I have the right to appeal to
design as a scientist. Well, many scientists already appeal to
design. I mentioned the SETI program earlier; clearly those
scientists think they can detect design (and nonhuman design at
that.) Forensic scientists routinely make decisions of whether a
death was designed (murder) or an unfortunate accident.
Archaeologists decide whether a stone is a designed artifact or just
a chance shape. And in Ruse's own example of the downed airliner,
investigators spent large amounts of effort to determine if the crash
was designed. As I explain in my book (pp. 196-197) it can be easy
to determine that a system was designed, but extremely difficult to
determine who the designer was. I do not argue that the designer was
God, although it could have been and certainly many people will think
so. I argue simply for the conclusion of design itself.
James Shapiro
I appreciate Professor Shapiro giving everyone a dose of reality in
his descriptions of the enormous and interactive complexities of the
cell, and certainly agree with him that they are beyond Darwinian
explanation. I can't quite understand, however, what he envisions as
an explanation for the origin of those systems. He seems to imply
that they somehow assemble themselves, which strikes me as having a
big chicken-and-egg problem. His analogies to computers and
information theory are quite congenial to intelligent design ideas.
However, he draws back from that conclusion for reasons I fail to
grasp. Still, I look forward to reading more of his ideas when he
fleshes them out.
(Behe M.J., "Reply to my critics", Boston Review, November 1996)
http://www-polisci.mit.edu/bostonreview/
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God bless.
Steve
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| Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net |
| 3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Steve.Jones@health.wa.gov.au |
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