Behe Says Viruses are Designed

I know. I was facetiously paraphrasing what you just said, using a common (American) idiom.

Alas, as E.B. White said, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”

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Please don’t dissect the frog, for I’m french😀

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Then you have to reckon with the fact that many of the molecular mechanisms by which viruses (and other pathogens) cause disease and evade our body’s immune system are so exquisitely complex. The same kind of complexity that creationists and IDers insist can’t possibly have evolved.

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The thing about maybes is they go both ways. And if you don’t have any evidence for them, they’re just-so stories.

And God is powerless to do anything about it of course? Indistinguishable from Gods that don’t exist, or just don’t care.

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@Giltil: Could you give us an example of something we might observe about viruses that would be incompatible with the existence of your god? Thanks.

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By “accident” do you mean the same thing as natural selection of mutation and variation?

Yes. Behe gives a nice example of this scenario in DD, with Yersinia Pestis, the bug that caused the Black Death in the fourteenth century (p187).

But not “accidental” as far as God is concerned, correct?

Another excellent illustration of the inherent inconsistencies of ID.

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One example I’ve highlighted before is the Type 6 secretion system:

@moderators I’d really appreciate it if someone could split out the digression to which @Nlents refers here, though I know it can be tedious. Thank you.

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I’m not sure if it is an inconsistency per se. Rather it is a lack of attention and depth. It seems that if ID were to be better engaged with theology, also, it would motivate a deeper study into this as a negative control against which to validate their other work.

At great expense and the cost of thousands of lives, the thread has been split. Everybody remember to wash your hands!

Find the split here: How do viruses work, anyway?

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The question is, rather, was it intended? It need not be accidental for to be unintended, because accidental carries with it some unnecessary additional implications. Note, however, that if it is “unintended” than it was not teleological or ID in any direct way. Perhaps it was indirectly a by product of some teleological process, but we can’t use ID as an explanatory force to explain away surprising (to IDist) biological observations here.

What are these implications?

Accidental might imply not foreseen, but unintended does not.

It is difficult to understand how an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity could have unforeseen or unintended events happen in his creation. We might have yet another classic supernatural paradox where we ask if an all seeing deity can create something he can’t see.

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Quite a bit of work has been put into building a coherent case for an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity that permits free will, imperfection, and even evil in creation. Given that these things are self evident, it is hardly a new question and it never seemed to be something that was either denied wholesale or a poison pill in historical contemplation.

Speaking from outside the tent, I’d say that all that work has been futile, as none of the case I’ve seen so far has been coherent if you look at it at all closely. Free will, all by itself, isn’t a coherent concept.

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This statement was slipped in here under the general theme that organisms that seem like pure pests to us often play important roles ecologically. Rather than cursing spiders that sometimes bite us, we remind ourselves that they keep the insect population at bay. Strains of the same bacteria that cause gastroenteritis are absolutely essential for production of vitamins that we then absorb, and so on.

I am not a virologist, but I’ve not heard this argument for viruses. Do they play an ordinary important role in human health, that of other animals, or ecosystems? I thought, at least in the short-term, they were pure intracellular parasites and never did anything useful. They’re not even alive, by most understandings of the term, and all they do is reprogram host cells to make more of themselves. Our physiology is replete with examples of beneficial and commensal bacteria, but I’ve not heard stories of viruses that are beneficial for humans. They’re everywhere, yes, but I don’t think that means they must be beneficial for something other than their own propagation. Yes, sometimes less harmful viruses occupy niches that more harmful ones might otherwise exploit, but that doesn’t seem like a positive point in the virus column to me.

I remember hearing a hypothesis that some viral infections help with protecting against a future bacterial infection through immune priming, but this was criticized for being speculative and the result of a highly specialized laboratory niche where a specific virus, norovirus I think, had picked up genes from a specific bacterium that sicken mice and so the viral infection left the mice somewhat protected from the bacteria. This hardly seems like a broad ecological role to me. Would ID proponents see design in that example? That seems like quite a stretch to me, even if it had been found in humans. One infection making a second infection a little bit less likely? Cmon. Beneficial relationships with bacteria have been known for at least a century and viruses have been studied just as intensely. Are there more established examples?

Of course, over geological time-scales, viruses have played crucial roles in important evolutionary events through horizontal gene transfer, but this is hardly a regular occurrence, nor is that a defined and regular ecological niche. It’s an extremely rare moment of serendipity, serendipity that won’t be fully realized for generations. Aren’t viruses pretty much always bad for their hosts? Maybe they are only marginally bad, but they are never “good,” (are they?) except if you count those trillion-in-one events and even then, it’s good for the lineage. The descendants benefit, not the original host. (And for this to be heritable, remember this horizontal gene transfer must occur via a viral infection in the gonads.)

I think it’s telling that Behe doesn’t even try to offer examples of the benefits of viruses to organisms or ecosystems, but instead alludes that there may be a function that we’re as yet unaware. @swamidass, you are impressed with his theology here (for reasons I also don’t understand), but what about his science. He sees design in viruses even though his criteria for design is “purposeful arrangement of parts.” Yes, the parts of a virus have purpose, but what about the whole?

The irony here is that the only known “purpose” of viruses (that I’m aware of) is that they occasionally are the vehicles of a process (evolutionary innovation through horizontal gene transfer) that Behe thinks can only occur through divine intervention.

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