In a message dated 10/1/2000 9:52:17 PM Pacific Daylight Time, DNAunion
writes:
> In a message dated 10/1/00 11:16:05 PM Central Daylight Time,
> FMAJ1019@aol.com writes:
>
> >FMAJ1019: From Behe's Empty Box
> (http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/box/behe.htm):
>
> "But read this argument carefully. Behe is not offering a way to detect
> design, he is offering a way to falsify gradual Darwinian evolution, and
> by elimination, conclude design. But there is one big problem- his
> falsifier has been falsified. The conclusion that an "irreducibly complex
> system cannot be produced gradually by slight,
> successive modifications of a precursor system" is simply wrong."
>
> DNAunion: But how exactly has Behe's falsifier been falsified?
>
> I visisted the site a while ago and looked around some, and found three
> examples/methods that supposedly countered Behe's IC concept. The first
> was the putative reduction of an IC mouse trap to a single piece. However,
> this fails as all the original pieces and functions were still present,
> they had just been merged into a single "multi-part piece" performing
> multiple functions. Another was the IC system of the Bolas spider,
> consisting of pheromone, single strand web that is swung by the spider, and
> the glue globule that catches the moth. However, this does not qualify as
> an IC system according to Behe's original definition. The one
> possibly-legitimate concept I ran across was gene duplication followed by
> diveregence (it occurs, but does it really produce new IC biological
> systems?).
>
Robison has shown a potential pathway to an IC system.
Robison shows a natural pathway to an IC system
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/review.html
Behe responded to the article but seems to have missed the point.
A classification of possible routes of Darwinian evolution. Richard H.
Thornhill1 and David W. Ussery. Published in The Journal of Theoretical
Biology, 203: 111-116, 2000.
"Possible routes of Darwinian evolution can be classified into four
fundamental categories, as outlined below."
> Anyway, could you provide more material as to how Behe's concept of IC has
> been refuted?
What has been shown is that 1) direct routes exist 2) indirect routes may
exist. This means that ICness itself is not a reliable indicator of design.
Behe writes:
"That definition has the advantage of promoting research: to state clear,
detailed evolutionary pathways; to measure probabilistic resources; to
estimate mutation rates; to determine if a given step is selected or not. It
allows for the proposal of any evolutionary scenario a Darwinist (or others)
may wish to submit, asking only that it be detailed enough so that relevant
parameters might be estimated. If the improbability of the pathway exceeds
the available probabilistic resources (roughly the number of organisms over
the relevant time in the relevant phylogenetic branch) then Darwinism is
deemed an unlikely explanation and intelligent design a likely one. "
Of course the same applies to ID. We need clear, detailed steps that show how
ID can generate the oberved system and we need probabilistic resources to
estimate the likelihood of such pathways. Behe is still confused that if
Darwinian pathways are deemed unlikely that ID is a likely one. Such a false
dichotomy does not make for good science.
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