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| quote: | A lot of stuff becomes rather inconsequential after that  but stay with it, and realize there is always something new to learn and one of these days something might come along that will totally change everything youve ever known, and youll have to adapt 
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I honestly think you have a pretty descent healthy view on things, so I'll spare you the direct questions and make some generalities (besides, we've been down that road anyways). In particular, I want to talk about Behe and the ID movement.
When I first read "Darwin's Black Box", I too felt Behe had brought up some compelling questions about Intelligent Design. Furthermore, after reading Dembski's "No Free Lunch", and seeing Dembski's mathmatical probability skills in full view, I felt the ID movement posed some interesting questions. And just out of curiousity, I also followed up with Dembski's "The Design Inference : Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities", and Dembski and Behe's "Intelligent Design". You throw in Jonathon Wells' "Icons of Evolution" (not an ID book, but an anti-evolutionist nonetheless), and Michael Denton's "Nature's Destiny : How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe", you might think that I would have been so incredibly skeptical of any evolutionary idea, and that I was very near to being an ID believer from that point forward.
It should also be noted that this idea of Intelligent Design is nothing new, though it is the current foothold that modern day creationists are using to gain access into the science classroom. William Paley had a somewhat similar idea in the early 19th century:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Paley
Strange how the same old creationist arguments continue to resurface. Anyway, back to my review….
But there was something very troubling to me when reading these books that were skeptical of evolutionary theory. Actually, there was a handful of things that were nagging at me. The first thing that troubled me was that despite their arguments, which were all pretty compelling even to me (a B.S. in Biology back in '97), I did not find one bit of positive verifiable piece of evidence to support their ID assertions. It seemed that every anti-evolutionist book I kept reading had pretty much the same assertions - there are problems with evolution, there are gaps in the theory, etc. etc. And instead of demonstrating positive evidence to support their case of ID, all the authors deemed it appropriate to fill in those "gaps" with an ID whom was responsible for it all. This troubled me, because one of the first and foremost tenets of any scientific inquiry is to have supporting evidence to explain a given event or phenomenon. The absence of any such evidence to explain certain phenomena can not logically give credence to another explanation without showing supporting evidence for that alternative explanation (in this case, an Intelligent Designer started the whole process of life creation - which isin't evolution in the first place, and/or an IDer conveniently intervenes intermittently to help create new species or alter evolutionary pathways). It was frustrating to continually read each ID author, despite some of their impressive backgrounds (Behe a PhD in biochemistry, Dembski a PhD in mathmatics), fail to fully explain or demonstrate any positive evidence to support their assertions that an IDer is involved somehow. At the time I didn't quite know logical fallacies very well, but this type of reasoning fits perfectly into the logical fallacy of bifurcation, or false dichotomy:
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheis...tml#bifurcation
Furthermore, it left open the door for any being, either supernatural, cosmological, or otherwise, to be the inherent culprit of design. IOW, the nature of the designer was left unexplained, which further complicated my understanding. As a result, it became apparent that readers could easily fill in their given choice of a designer on their own. Dembski, a devout Christian, of course, filled in the unknown designer with his own Christian God, without ever showing any evidence to do so. I found this to be highly inappropriate, and it certainly was not science.
The second problem I had, specifically with Behe's “Darwin’s Black Box”, is that each and every proposed evolutionary pathway he has problems with and proposes ID involvement instead, has been shown to have some possible evolutionary pathways for their formation. But to understand fully what Behe is referring to when speaking of Irreducible Complexity, let’s look at his definition, according to his book:
| quote: | | By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional. |
So the trick is to see whether or not successive modifications of a precursor system has produced positive results for an evolutionary pathway. And if you look at his argument carefully, you see that Behe is not offering a way to detect design, he is offering a way to falsify gradual Darwinian evolution, and by elimination, conclude design (which is a false dichotomy fallacy to begin with). 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. There are at least three different ways that an IC system can be produced by a series of small modifications: 1) Improvements become necessities, 2) Loss of scaffolding 3) Duplication and divergence.
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay...rreducible.html
And as H. Allen Orr states about this fatal logical flaw in Behe’s argument:
| quote: | "Behe's colossal mistake is that, in rejecting these possibilities, he concludes that no Darwinian solution remains. But one does. It is this: An irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts that, while initially just advantageous, become-because of later changes-essential. The logic is very simple. Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts may all be required."
"The point is there's no guarantee that improvements will remain mere improvements. Indeed because later changes build on previous ones, there's every reason to think that earlier refinements might become necessary. The transformation of air bladders into lungs that allowed animals to breathe atmospheric oxygen was initially just advantageous: such beasts could explore open niches-like dry land-that were unavailable to their lung-less peers. But as evolution built on this adaptation (modifying limbs for walking, for instance), we grew thoroughly terrestrial and lungs, consequently, are no longer luxuries-they are essential. The punch-line is, I think, obvious: although this process is thoroughly Darwinian, we are often left with a system that is irreducibly complex. I'm afraid there's no room for compromise here: Behe's key claim that all the components of an irreducibly complex system 'have to be there from the beginning' is dead wrong. |
Unfortunately for Behe, precursor evolutionary pathways are well documented. Furthermore, possible evolutionary pathways can be demonstrated in his examples given that he claims have only arisen from Intelligent Design. Rather than explain each example in painstaking detail, I’ll direct you to some websites that show refutations of his examples:
1. His mousetrap analogy:
http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html
2. Vertebrate Blood Clotting:
http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Darw...t/Clotting.html
http://www.bostonreview.net/br22.1/doolittle.html
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/ar..._10_31_2002.asp (fantastic debate between Miller and Behe)
3. Antibodies and the Immune System:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/icsic.html
http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/Evolving_Immunity.html
4. Bombadier Beetles:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html
5. Bacterial Flagella:
http://www.health.adelaide.edu.au/P...ys/flagella.htm
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB200_1.html
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/flagellum.cfm
6. Cilia:
http://www.btinternet.com/~clare.stevens/behenot.htm
7. Metabolic Pathways:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/review.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...6&dopt=Abstract
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/e...n1/article.html
And an excellent review from a couple of biochemists:
http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/Behe.html
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/e...n1/article.html
And if you’re absolutely dying to know where to locate primary literature on these rebuttals, here’s an exhaustive list of literature on each topic:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/publish.html
After reading the criticisms, I started realizing that this idea of ID was, in essence, not unfamiliar at all with any other creationist idea – it has already drawn it’s own conclusions without any evidence to support those conclusions, and furthermore those conclusions and assertions are untested assertions to begin with. Behe also draws upon a number of other logical fallacies, including creating strawmen, ad hoc, shifting the goalposts, and of course, argument from incredulity – which is the ultimate take home message here. Behe simply fills in the gaps with an IDer (umm, God, in case you were wondering), when he simply fails to understand or refuse to accept possible evolutionary pathways developing complex designs.
But lastly, I think the ultimate underlying problem with Behe’s argument is that he simply wouldn’t have an argument to begin with if he simply understood evolutionary principles better. This is a pretty shocking statement to make, given the fact that Behe himself is a biochemist scientist. But his misunderstandings of evolution are evident throughout his book with all the logical fallacies thrown at evolutionary concepts, one after another. For Behe to be able to continue working as a scientist and to follow scientific principles via the scientific method, which ultimately contributed to his collegiate research position, but yet throw that basic scientific tenet for an untestable, and unproven idea like ID, which is in direct contrast to scientific methodology, is truly mind boggling. In closing, I’d like to post this thought from a buddy in another forum on the matter of Behe and ID:
| quote: | But now I'll go ahead and state my own position: If all life descended from a common ancestor (or a few) by natural undirected processes, then the same sorts of natural undirected processes may have been how that common ancestor community got there. Behe is making the fact that our knowledge of abiogenesis may always be extremely tentative his a priori evidence that intelligent intervention was involved. He offers no example of a biological structure or organism arising solely through intelligent intervention, but he asserts that this is a scientific explanation. In fact it is neither.
Intelligent design creationists cannot tell us why the universal application of natural law is an invalid assumption, but they accuse us of being overly credulous for accepting that assumption in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Why 'IC' or 'specified complexity' or any other attribute should automatically signify the inadequacy of natural laws and processes has never been explained. Why the inadequacy of methodological naturalism doesn't invalidate empirical evidential inquiry as a whole has never been explained. ID creationism is based on stretching metaphors, arguments from analogy, and explanatory filters rigged to arrive at the IDC-ordained conclusion.
The attacks on Behe shine a harsh light on the scientific, philosophical, and logical shortcomings of intelligent design creationism. They have been successful in relegating IDC and God-of-the-gaps methodology to the status of smart-sounding but ultimately irrelevant creationist nonsense. |
And finally, if there were an Intelligent Designer who’s created everything, this ID being has some explaining to do for some of the following “anomalies”:
http://www.freewebs.com/oolon/SMOGGM.htm
And if this hasn’t gotten you excited enough, I’ll have another post on Dembski tomorrow!
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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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He's completely ignored my, yours and DrUg_Tit0's responses, so there probably isn't much chance of getting a serious response. 
