Correction. I wrote:
>From: Stephen E. Jones <sejones@iinet.net.au>
[...]
>>CH>However, that is not what the leaders of the ID movement are engaged
in.
>>>They call ID science, but refuse to hold to the standards of science.
>>
>>What does Cliff think Mike Behe's irreducible complexity hypothesis
>>is? He has proposed it as a testable, falsifiable hypothesis, and
>>his scientific critics have in fact subjected it to scientific
>>criticism:
>
>I note that, despite my lengthy explanations, Stephen *still* doesn't
>understand the meaning of falsifiability.
I didn't read Stephen's paragraph carefully enough. Since it followed on
from Cliff's paragraph on ID, and since Behe himself usually talks in
terms of falsification of ID, I assumed Stephen was talking about the ID
hypothesis, which I have already shown is not falsifiable. Now I see that
Stephen was talking about Behe's *IC* hypothesis.
Now, I don't think Behe ever refers to an "IC hypothesis" as such, so it's
not entirely clear to me what Stephen means by it. Rather than ask others to
provide clarification of what this hypothesis is, it would be more
appropriate for Stephen to say what *he* thinks it is, since he's the one
supporting it. But, I doubt he'll do so. I guess Stephen means something
like this: "Certain biological systems possess a property called irreducible
complexity, and systems with this property are necessarily the result of
intelligent design."
To falsify this hypothesis, it would be necessary to demonstrate that a
particular IC system evolved without ID. Given that the mechanism of ID is
totally unspecified and is allowed (by its proponents) to be supernatural,
such a demonstration is impossible. No matter how carefully organisms were
observed, it would never be possible to establish that no intelligent
designer interfered in their evolution. A demonstration of the theoretical
possibility of an IC system evolving naturally would be possible, but I
don't think this would count as a falsification, and I'm sure it wouldn't be
accepted by IDers. Behe could always claim that such a demonstration was not
detailed or realistic enough to convince him.
Furthermore, for the IC hypothesis to be falsified, it would be necessary to
have a more rigorous definition of IC, which would enable us to definitively
say whether a certain system is IC or not. Otherwise, it is always open to
Behe to argue that the system in question is not IC after all. (It would, of
course, be embarrassing for him if this were a system that he'd already
declared to be IC, but I doubt that that would stop him from changing his
mind if necessary.)
Incidentally, I wonder whether Stephen deliberately chose to mention the IC
hypothesis rather than the ID hypothesis, or if he simply failed to
differentiate between the two. Probably the latter, as this is the kind of
mistake that Behe himself makes:
"In fact, my argument for intelligent design is open to direct experimental
rebuttal. Here is a thought experiment that makes the point clear. In
Darwin's Black Box (Behe 1996) I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was
irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design. The flip
side of this claim is that the flagellum can't be produced by natural
selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process. To
falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a
bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure (for
mobility, say), grow it for ten thousand generations, and see if a
flagellum--or any equally complex system--was produced. If that happened, my
claims would be neatly disproven.(1)"
(http://www.discovery.org/embeddedRecentArticles.php3?id=445)
Note that Behe confuses rebuttal of his *argument* for intelligent design
with falsification of the ID hypothesis (the title of this section is "Is
Intelligent Design Falsifiable?"). He then puts forward a more limited
hypothesis for falsification: "that the flagellum can't be produced by
natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent
process." Now, if we take only this more limited hypothesis, and if Behe is
prepared to deny the possibility of an unknown designer interfering in the
experiment he suggests (and I don't know what the basis for such a denial
would be), then this hypothesis is falsifiable in principle (though probably
not in practice, since the amount of time and number of organisms available
to the experimenters would be miniscule in comparison to those that were
available in the wild).
The remainder of my response still stands...
>Not that falsifiability alone is
>sufficient to make a claim scientific anyway--evidence is required.
>Stephen's idea that scientific criticism of an argument makes that argument
>(or the hypothesis it purports to support) scientific seems to be on a par
>with his idea that, for a theory to be considered scientific, there must be
>a telling argument *against* it. In other words, it's nonsense.
Richard Wein (Tich)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 08 2000 - 08:23:49 EDT