>I respect your viewpoint, Terry, because you're in the field. Obviously, this
>is where the debate needs to be. You specialists need to continue to duke it
>out, and we need to continue to watch. This is "peer review" at its finest,
>isn't it? So what would you think of having Behe review your latest post?
I'd be happy to have Mike respond, but I know what he will say. We have a
profound disagreement here. For now at least, the professional opinion is
on my side. If Mike is making any inroads, it's among the philosophers,
lawyers, and theologians. As Dennett said, if Behe is right, then he's on
the road to Stockholm, and if that's true, then there should be a host of
copy-cats following him. To date, there has been no such response from the
professional biochemical community.
The other issue that I have raised three years ago (and now several others
have as well) is that it is not the existence of irreducibly complex
systems that is called into question. The question is whether or not
irreducibly complex systems can originate by an evolutionary means (either
Darwinian or otherwise). I say yes. Mike says no. In one sense Mike
simply declares that the answer is no and then seeks to show that certain
biological systems are irreducibly complex--that's the logic of his book.
It's almost a syllogism--if a system needs all its parts to have its
function, then evolution by natural selection couldn't have produced it
because there is no function to select unless all the parts are already
there. Of course, he's right--by definition. But no one is claiming that
it happened this way--exaptation, self-organized criticality, and the other
proposals all claim that the parts existed for some other function prior to
the function presently found in the irreducibly complex systems. But once
even a rudmentary function is obtained, then natural selection can do its
work, perfecting that system. What we now see are the highly perfected
systems!
Fortunately, time is on my side. Behe is arguing that we are not going to
find the details he's looking for. That's a pretty gutsy and even a
foolish claim. We'll see. But for now, I see no reason to abandon ship.
TG
_____________________________________________________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 49546
Office: (616) 957-7187 FAX: (616) 957-6501
Email: grayt@calvin.edu http://www.calvin.edu/~grayt
*This mission critical message was written on a Macintosh with Eudora Pro*
Special messages for Macintosh naysayers:
http://www.macworld.com/pages/july.96/Column.2204.html
http://www.macworld.com/pages/june.97/Column.3700.html