Yes. And I am constantly mystified by the way in which the poorly-substantiated views of Michael Behe are apparently thought, by so many of his supporters, to ring truest when delivered in a YouTube video. Video is a TERRIBLE way to obtain information about Behe’s views. His horrid books, and the dumpster fire he lit in Dover, are the best sources there.
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He uses more words and when you paraphrase you misrepresent him driven your filter.
Which is utterly meaningless scientifically.
Do we have juries in murder trials read books written by counsel for both sides to decide on guilt, or do we employ actual evidence, something that ID proponents can always be counted on to objectively and aggressively misrepresent?
That’s precisely what Rum said, Bill. Far too many words, given the cherry-picking and misrepresentation of objective evidence that Behe does.
I don’t see any misrepresentation. Perhaps you can either explain in more detail or retract your vapid accusation.
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The detail is explained by Behe. Paraphrasing is used as a rhetorical trick to change an argument which is a straw-man fallacy. Behe’s arguments are hard to defeat without invoking logical fallacies.
No it’s really just done to shorten and summarize something that doesn’t need to be overly verbose. Being concise is a virtue, not a rhetorical trick.
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For myself at least, I agree with @Rumraket here. While I don’t doubt that some will use it as a rhetorical trick, there are others who are trying to connect one thing you said with another thing you said.
I watched 40 minutes of the video (again) and I’m still not exactly sure of Behe’s argument so I would appreciate some paraphrasing (I’m happy to have it done by a supporter, so @colewd maybe you might humor me). I think I would paraphrase it as “purposeful arrangement of parts is how we know if something is designed and there are examples of what look to be purposeful arrangements of parts in biology, therefore we can infer that design was involved and random mutation and natural selection are insufficient to explain it all”
I didn’t see IC in there exactly. Behe does mention that the purposeful arrangement bit can be quantified, is that what IC is?
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Hi Jordan
This is not complete but its closer than Rum’s version. Maybe you can spot the straw-man in Rums paraphrasing when you compare it to yours.
What’s missing in your paraphrase of his argument is our minds ability to detect design where he shows several examples. Whats common among the examples is a “purposeful arrangement of parts”.
Also that the design inference is quantitative where design detection is not obvious in certain cases but very obvious in others. This depends on the amount of parts and how tightly they are arranged.
There may be some I have missed but I will watch it again tonight and add where appropriate. Thanks for you congenial approach as I know you are not a fan of ID.
I watched Behe and Dan Cardinale talk about IC and Behe said something very similar to what you put in quotes. I was entirely underwhelmed by his retort considering that he has hung on to the idea for over two decades. In the end, for Behe certain biological systems are designed simply because he thinks so. The scientific community was right not to take him seriously and for the minority who did, thanks for exposing the serious flaws in his arguments.
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That’s not what quantitative means.
Qualitative: the kettle is hot.
Semi-qualitative: the kettle is red hot.
Quantitative: the temperature of the kettle is 500°c.
Interestingly, @dsterncardinale asked Behe to provide a mathematical means of detecting design in relatively more complex IC systems and Behe’s response was basically: if you see, you know it.
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It can be, but you have yet to demonstrate how it is being used that way. Therefore, your accusation is vapid.
Behe’s arguments depend entirely on ignoring most of the relevant evidence and objectively misrepresenting some of the most critical evidence. That is not invoking any logical fallacies, Bill.
And yes, they use many words to say very, very little.
Really? Behe:
Yet through all that, there have been no significant basic biochemical changes in the virus at all…Neither has much else happened at a molecular level. No new gizmos or basic machinery. There have been no reports of new viral protein-protein interactions developing in an infected cell due to mutations in HIV proteins. No gene duplication has occurred leading to a new function. None of the fancy tricks that routinely figure in Darwinian speculations has apparently been of much use to HIV.
Quantitatively true or false, Bill? If the latter, by what factor? Let’s be quantitative here.
Is malarial resistance to chloroquine a binary or continuous variable?
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Given that Behe managed to defeat the entire project of putting ID into the schools through one disastrous cross-examination, doing nothing but answering questions about his views, I don’t quite know what to say. It is, of course, likely that Behe employed various logical fallacies in his testimony, but I have a feeling that this is not the type of fallacy usage of which you are speaking.
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Our minds? So why does it not work for my mind? For eyes and flight feathers, what I are detect natural causes at work. My mind detects design for motors and watches, but for biological structures, my ability to detect design seems to be missing. What if I’m not the only one with this impairment?
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That defect is a result of devolution.
Checkmate.
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Do better, then.
I’ve watched the video myself, a few times, and @Rumraket’s summary is 100% accurate as far as I can see.
Defeating his arguments is irrelevant. He is trying to support a scientific hypothesis. That it can be expressed as a valid argument is not sufficient to do so.
One could make the following argument in support of the existence of unicorns: “That no one has found physical evidence for the existence of unicorns does not mean they do not exist. Such evidence could exist, but simply not yet been found by anyone.”
This reasoning is sound. But it does not provide good support for the hypothesis that there are unicorns.
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show me how to do that.
if we know that on average it takes about 10^20 mutations to evolve any organ, then we can caluclate how many organs can be created at a given time. this is what im trying to do.
so how long does it take to develop a system capable of causing a creature to approach or move away from a light source? do you agree with me that at least few new parts\mutations are needed to do so? we know that from human engineering. we cant just add a single part to a moving system and it will suddenly start to move to a light source.
If I am assembling an electric clock and have added everything except the battery, it does not work.
Then, I add the battery and - Ta da! - it works.
We done?
You are aware that there are only 3 billion base pairs in the entire human genome, right? And this is far, far, far fewer than 10^20?
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Actually, all you need is a system that already has:
- motility — the system can move
- a feedback loop — the system changes movement in response to inputs
So if we had a system that moves in response to sound, for instance, all we’d need to do is plug in a photodiode.
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Even then, 10^20 is not that big a number.
Starting from some napkin math by /u/workingmouse on reddit
In a gram of soil, it has been estimated that there can be found about 10^10 individual bacteria from between 4 * 10^3 to 5 * 10^4 species. Using the high end of species and dividing evenly, that’s roughly 2 * 105 or two hundred thousand individual bacteria per species in said gram. While bacterial genome sizes vary quite a bit, the average is a bit under four million base pairs (4 Mbp), so we’ll round up and use that. The mutation rate for bacteria, as a rule of thumb, is about 0.003 mutations per genome per cell generation. Putting that another way, one out of every three-hundred and thirty-three-ish bacteria will carry a mutation when they divide. The rate of division among bacteria is also variable; under good conditions, E. coli divides as often as every twenty minutes. Growth conditions in the wild are often not as good, however; we’ll use a high-end average estimate of ten hours per generation. While many forms of mutation can affect large swaths of bases at once, to make things harder for us we’re also going to assume that only single-base mutations occur.
So, in the members of one species of bacteria found in one gram of soil, how long would it take to sample every possible mutation that could be made to their genome?
.0003 mutations per generation per genome times 200,000 individuals (genomes) gives us 600 mutations per generation. 4,000,000 bases divided by 600 generations per genome gives us ~6,667 generations to have enough mutations to cover every possible base. 6,667 generations times 10 hours per generation gives us roughly 66,670 hours, which comes out to 7.6 years.
So on average, each bacterial species found within a gram of soil will have enough mutations to cover the entire span of the genome every 7.6 years.
One cubic meter of soil weighs between 1.2 and 1.7 metric tonnes. Using the low estimate (again, to make things harder for us), a cubic meter of soil contains 1,200,000 grams. Within a cubic meter of soil, assuming the same population levels and species-diversity, each of those 50,000 species of bacteria will mutate enough times within their population to cover their entire genome every 3.3 minutes. (66,670 hours divided by 1,200,000 is 0.0556; multiply by 60 to get minutes.)
So every hour or so there are 80,000,000 mutations per species in 1 cubic metre of soil.
Now, the earth has about 510 million square km of land. Assuming bacteria only live in the top 1k
m of soil,
To reach 10^20 mutations, each bacterial species in the soil only needs about 8 seconds.
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if it doesnt work than why it should evolve in first place? we are talking about changing a functional system into another one. not changing a non functional system to a functional one.
sure. this is irrelevant to my claim.
how many parts a photodiode contain? in addition, can we add it without changing the system to which we add it? (do we not need some special socket?)
it is big if we are talking about animals. especially large animals.
Poor @scd surely gave himself a hernia moving so many goal posts at once.
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