I just finished watching this discussion with Michael Behe and found myself frustrated that certain points did not receive any follow up. I also found it frustrating that someone who is so close to the ID position in a broad sense would fail to appreciate the force of the arguments that Dr. Behe and others have made.
First I should say that I’m a layperson and I’m well aware that my knowledge is limited. That’s the reason I prefer to learn from watching debates rather than from just reading literature on one side of the debate. Usually it is extremely one-sided in favor of the ID theorist. The evolutionist usually fails to even understand the argument being made, let alone provide compelling counter arguments. This debate was far less one-sided the many of the others I have seen, and for that I think you deserve some commendation.
The first point which I would have liked to hear Dr. Behe press you on is this whole issue of genetic drift as a mechanism for gene fixation, and how that helps explain how certain evolutionary transitions took place in such a short amount of time. This claim actually makes me angry. Anyone who has spent any time talking to evolutionists will be familiar with how pedantic they are about pointing out that “evolution isn’t random” because although mutations are random “natural selection is non-random.” But if most mutations become fixed as a result of genetic drift, which is random, then evolution is actually far more random than evolutionists publicly represent it to be. And if evolution is such a random process, you then have to explain how it just serendipitously forms these systems of mutually-compatible parts that form functional wholes. In other words, to the extent that genetic drift helps explain the problem of fixation rates, it creates an equally big problem on another front. How would you address this issue?
You also glossed over a critical point about exaptation because you were too hung up on definitions. If exaptation means taking existing parts unmodified and repurposing them for use in some other context, then evolutionists need to show either that the individual parts of the flagellar motor each perform some function individually or as part of some other protein complex. On the other hand, if exaptation can also involve modifying existing parts to serve other purposes, then you have to explain how those parts were magically modified so that they all fit together to form the bacterial flagellum. In either case, these challenges don’t prove deductively that the flagellum is unevolvable, but it does mean that the best explanation we currently have is that intelligence was required.
This leads to another question that I wish evolutionists would answer. As ID proponents are fond of pointing out, Darwin said in the origin of species that if it could be shown that any feature of living things could not be explained by reference to a stepwise process, that this would effectively refute evolutionary theory. ID theorists have offered several such examples. I have seen no actual refutations of any of these examples where by “actual” I mean detailed, stepwise accounts based on empirical evidence. Instead, I find evolutionists promising that one day there will be an explanation if we just believe in the power of natural processes! But if scientists always assume that the future will yield some evolutionary explanation, then how on earth is evolution supposed to be falsified? How will they ever know that it is false if their faith is so unassailable that not even decades of failure to find explanations can shake it? Why can’t evolutionists simply admit that intelligent design is the best current explanation we have while continuing to look for other explanations?
Finally, there was another point that I wish Behe had pressed you on. At one point, again talking about rearranging existing parts for other uses, he brought up your example of a bone being repurposed for use in a flipper. He pointed out that there are a lot of intermediate steps that would have to occur to accomplish that repurposing. Your response was that the existence of intermediate steps makes the transition more plausible. But I think you completely missed his point (which is why he subsequently missed yours.) Just because we can imagine intermediate morphologies for a bone like this doesn’t mean that there is a viable molecular and morphological pathway from one to the other, where “viable” means that each step is biochemically possible and not mal-adaptive. Unless such a pathway exists, then our imaginary intermediate steps are pure fantasy, not science. So what evidence is there for such a pathway, particularly in the case of the various structures ID theorists cite of irreducible complexity?
I hope these questions send you on a fruitful investigative trajectory, and one that I, as a layperson, can benefit from.
