What do you think worked well about how we engaged? From my perspective, this was the most substantive of our exchanges.
I got the overall impression that youād done your homework, and were prepared for what Behe was going to say. One example would be Beheās statement that the judge just copy-pasted the words of the plaintiffs in his decision, which you were able to quickly deflate by explaining that this was not at all unusual.
The fact that you were able to effectively respond to most of such assertions by Behe basically left him with only two standing assertions, both of which seem to me to be self-undermining.
First is the idea that āeveryone in the scientific community have been wrong beforeā, which seems to me to make it more likely that Behe is wrong (since heās now by his own admission standing opposite of an entire scientific field). Generally speaking, standing in opposition to the entire scientific community makes it exceptionally more likely youāre just wrong. For every one example Behe can think of where previously held ideas were overturned, one can think of millions of examples of bad ideas that never went anywhere.
He asserted that there was initial resistance to the Big Bang theory on account of itās perceived theistic implications to some people, but it seems to me this example is also self-undermining, as the Big Bang theory is now basically established cosmology. So somehow the Great Atheistic Conspiracy of Modern Scienceā¢ didnāt prevent the acceptance and establishment of the big bang model.
And as you pointed out, you just had a discussion with Eugenie Scott and Nathan Lents where you all agreed that if ID got itās act together and managed to abide by proper scientific principles in advancing and formulating their ideas, youād have no problem seeing it become part of established science, and then eventually finding itās way into textbooks.
What does he then have left?
And then you got him to promise to read your book and respond to it.
Oh and, of course I think it holds tremendous value that you canāt be dismissed as just another atheist scientist out to disprove God.
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There is an interesting (and sharp) contrast between Beheās characterisation of the judge and Kenneth Millerās. Kenneth Miller recalls his Dover experience
I found Behe surprisingly combative, and not in a good and substantive way. For a man who desperately needs dialogue with other biologists in order to work his views into shape, he just seemed bad-tempered and dismissive ā not a good attitude for someone who is on the outside of the consensus and trying to find someone who will agree with him. Thereās a difference between being a dissenter and being a crank, and this was crank, at 120 decibels.
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I tried to give some simple answers. 
What was it about what happened there that pushed you to the design side? And what do you mean by that exactly?
I thought Behe was pretty friendly. It is a bad sign for his intellectual argument when he attacks the credibility of the judge and the integrity of his critics, but he didnāt seam mean about it; just frustrated.
Pandaās Thumb covered this here:
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The thing I was waiting for, and never did hear, was just what it was that he thought was Kafkaesque about the experience. Seriously, the Dover trial path for him seems about as straightforward as it gets: expert report, followed by deposition, followed by trial testimony, followed by decision. If heād been lured into a subterranean chamber in mid-trial where he had been questioned by The Grand Inquisitor about his taste in sandwiches and the color of subway tiles in Budapest, then āKafkaesqueā might have been a good description. But Iām guessing that didnāt happen. It usually doesnāt.
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He explains in writing right here, and was generous to let me see the pre-publication text and quote from it:
By the time the whole thing was finished I had a lot more sympathy for the protagonist of Franz Kafkaās novel The Trial, and a much sharper understanding of the term Kafkaesque: āMarked by surreal distortion.ā On reflection Iāve concluded that it pretty much didnāt matter what I said on the stand, nor what any of the other expert witnesses on either side said. The outcome of the case was decided long before the trial began. It was decided when the hoopla started, when the media cast the whole affair in terms of stereotypical heroes and villains, and when the judge consulted old Hollywood films for better perspective. A courtroom is no place to discuss intellectual issues.
Behe, Michael J. A Mousetrap for Darwin . Discovery Institute Press, in press.
So the trial was rigged, and by the fake news media at that? How very Trumpian of him.
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That is surreal, as is it surreal when the anti-evolution lawyer is consulting the same film for perspective too, and openly stating that this is a redo of the Scopeās trial.
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Seriously, most of us have no idea how trials are supposed to work, and literally zero experience with them. I think you underestimate the degree of naivety that most of us have to the courts. Iām sure even a banal trial would be surreal to me if I was a central participant, because I have zero experience with it.
Yikes. Thatās pretty bad.
It certainly did matter what he said on the stand. If anyone in this world could have made a good case for ID being science, itād be Behe. He stands head and shoulders above every other personality in the ID movement, in terms of credentials. His work is largely independent of the imbecilities and dishonesty which characterize the work of the others.
But he couldnāt make it work. Nobody can. The difficulty with this subject is not in how you testify or how someone interprets that testimony. The difficulty is that words really do have meanings, and that so long as the testimony has to have reference to some actual thing or occurrence in the real world, Behe cannot magically use words to convert nonsense into sense or non-science into science. At best, he could do to a judge what ID generally tries to do to children: bamboozle.
Sure, he may think the case was tried in the press. But I doubt very much that the judge was influenced by that. He may feel that the cultural background, from Scopes to Inherit The Wind to The Genesis Flood, prejudiced the case against him ā but it is in the light of that cultural background that the facts must be viewed, when the question is how this ID phenomenon fits into that culture and what categories ā religion, science, and other ā it belongs to. The case was not ONLY about the scientific question. It was very much about religion, because the whole gravamen of the complaint is violation of the First Amendment.
And if you donāt like your religious fundamentalist client being a stereotypical villain, you probably shouldnāt sign up to serve a client who obviously IS a stereotypical villain. Buckingham was a perjurer, and the other board members were hardly innocent, either ā at best they were innocent dupes who ought to have known better and who owed their constituents a better job of scrutinizing the religious and political nonsense that Buckingham and Bonsell were spouting.
Well, legal proceedings have a way of being hard to understand, for sure. I recall winning a spectacular victory once, walking out of the courtroom with my client, and having him turn and say to me, in all sincerity, āwell, THAT didnāt go very well.ā It took me a good while to explain to him that it had gone extremely well and that weād gotten 100% of what we wanted.
But being a witness is a relatively straightforward affair except in one sense that may have been unfamiliar to him: that itās not like being a professor. You donāt get to set the curriculum. You are asked questions. While on direct examination you have relatively free rein to answer open-ended questions, on cross you should expect to be hemmed in to a degree. On redirect you should expect to be offered the chance to explain, but only if counsel on your side thinks itās going to help.
But who does not know this? Television courtroom dramas are deceptive about all sorts of aspects of litigation, but the depiction of the experience of a witness is the closest these shows come to reality. Indeed, harsh, withering cross-examination is a regular feature of those depictions ā more so than in reality, actually.
I think that he is disappointed, basically, that he didnāt get to treat the judgeās opinion as an exam he could grade. He didnāt get to editorialize on it, in a way that could have any consequence to the outcome. But, cripes ā people are disappointed in litigation outcomes all the time. Some of the worst decisions Iāve had have come from excellent judges who, on those matters, I profoundly disagree with. It doesnāt make me rail against their status as English majors.
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I watched the discussion. Here are some of my thoughts:
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Like @Puck_Mendelssohn , I thought that Behe was not in the best of moods. My suspicion is that he wanted to have a discussion with Josh the reviewer of his book, and not Josh who agrees with Behe about many things (such as the common ancestry of humans and apes). I am just guessing, but I think it possible that many over the years have used his views on human evolution to try and drive a wedge between himself and the greater ID and Christian community, and he is sick of this.
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Can we please just drop all the āmousetrapā claptrap? It was a lame analogy in 1996, and it has long since served any usefulness it may have had. I cannot believe people still argue against (or for) IC using this example.
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If it were me, I would grant Behe that IC circa 1996 was an interesting idea. I would also stress that, 25 years later, it has been laid firmly to rest as an impediment to evolution. Sure, maybe every experiment on every IC system one may imagine has not been done. But we know that IC can evolve ā incrementally, in one fell swoop, by many different mechanisms. Pointing to an IC complex and proclaiming that, because the experiment Behe imagines has not been done, intelligence is required to explain its origins is not a valid or even useful scientific approach. Hammer Behe each and every time he resorts to āthe experiment has not been done, therefore designā. Challenge him ā can he describe positive experimental evidence that supports his claims about intelligence and the origins of IC? Can he point to any data that says specifically that, for example, the bacterial flagellum cannot possibly have evolved without intelligent intervention? If he cannot, then the precedent provided by many, many examples rules the day rhetorically and scientifically. (And incidentally, āpurposely arranged partsā is not positive experimental evidence for anything. It is a euphemism for āit looks that way to Beheā. And the only thing it shows is that Behe has very, very poor eyesight.)
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It was interesting to hear Behe so clearly state his misrepresentation of Nick Whiteās review (the one where Behe got his 10^20 number). It did not take 10^20 parasites to evolve two point mutations (which is what Behe asserted in the discussion, and also his second book). Once again, for those who have forgotten, here is the complete passage from the review (White, N. J. 2004. Antimalarial drug resistance. J. Clin. Invest. 113:1084-92) Behe pulled the number from:
āChloroquine resistance in P. falciparum may be multigenic and is initially conferred by mutations in a gene encoding a transporter (PfCRT) (13). In the presence of PfCRT mutations, mutations in a second transporter (PfMDR1) modulate the level of resistance in vitro, but the role of PfMDR1 mutations in determining the therapeutic response following chloroquine treatment remains unclear (13). At least one other as-yet unidentified gene is thought to be involved. Resistance to chloroquine in P. falciparum has arisen spontaneously less than ten times in the past fifty years (14). This suggests that the per-parasite probability of developing resistance de novo is on the order of 1 in 10^20 parasite multiplications.ā
In the discussion with @swamidass, Behe asserted that 10^20 parasites was the number needed to get the two point mutations in PfCRT he is so fixated on. The complete paragraph from the cited review tells a very different story. IMO, Behe should be called to account for this discrepancy, and invited to revise his estimate of āthe edge of evolutionā.
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What the heck was Behe going on about disulfide linkages? Is he really claiming that new disulfide linkages in proteins cannot evolve (originate, rearrange, or whatever)? Maybe someone can paste some quotes from wherever he has claimed this.
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@swamidass , Behe wanted you to talk more about his latest book. You should have taken the opportunity to ask him if he was going to correct his claims about the polar bear genome in any revisions. Will he explain that the polar bear mutations he went on and on about are not actually fixed in the polar bear genome? These genes are actually not ābrokenā in the ways he claims. He owes his readers some corrections.
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Well, I certainly agree with this, but honestly felt he was a bit under the gun. I did not want to come off as a bully. The polar bear work is going to come up soon by other means (see: @NLENTS).
Yes that was very surprising to me too.
Yeah, I agree, but unfortunately too technical for this event.
Yeah, I was also surprised he brought up that analogy, and that he so casually dismissed exaptation.
What is interesting to me is that I do in fact agree with Behe on many things, and that more people are coming to see that this is true. This time around, it seems that none of the secular viewers batted an eye at all about the rhetorical path I took there.
Ultimately, I think for Christians the question of āevidence for design in science?ā is not even a secondary issue, its more like a tertiary issue. The really difficult questions come up with human evolution, where it is nearly impossible to see a distinction between Behe and I. For IDists that appeal to Behe, that should raise a lot of questions. Why exactly is the flagellum important if Behe agrees that this whole argument has nothing to do with human evolution?
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Yeah, Iāve been wondering that for some time. As I said in my Amazon review:
I think one of the things that people have generally failed to appreciate is that Beheās arguments have no relevance to the thing that gives most creationists fits: the fact that humans are apes, monkeys, primates, mammals, et cetera. To use his ideas about cellular novelty for those purposes youāve got to turn to very, very loose analogy and even if one thought it did work at the cellular novelty level, it completely stops working at the metazoan level.
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Given that Judge Jonesā decision cited Beheās testimony a whopping 28 times, and other expert witneses liberally as well, I find this claim quite frankly delusional. Did Jones draw from Beheās testimony the conclusions that Behe wanted him to? Almost certainly not. But Behe made numerous admissions that were harmful to the defenseās case (either through casting doubt on IDās credibility or his own), which were cited in the decision:
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āboth Professors Behe and Minnich admitted their personal view is that the designer is Godā
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āStated another way, ID posits that animals did not evolve naturally through evolutionary means but were created abruptly by a non-natural, or supernatural, designer. Defendantsā own expert witnesses acknowledged this point. (21:96-100 (Behe); P-718 at 696, 700 (āimplausible that the designer is a natural entityā)ā
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ālead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology.ā
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āWhat is more, defense experts concede that ID is not a theory as that term is defined by the NAS and admit that ID is at best āfringe scienceā which has achieved no acceptance in the scientific community.ā
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āProfessor Behe admitted in āReply to My Criticsā that there was a defect in his view of irreducible complexity ā¦ In that article, Professor Behe wrote that he hoped to ārepair this defect in future work;ā however, he has failed to do so even four years after elucidating his defect.ā
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āHowever, Professor Behe excludes, by definition, the possibility that a precursor to the bacterial flagellum functioned not as a rotary motor, but in some other way, for example as a secretory system.ā
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āMoreover, cross-examination revealed that Professor Beheās redefinition of the blood-clotting system was likely designed to avoid peer-reviewed scientific evidence that falsifies his argument, as it was not a scientifically warranted redefinition.ā
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"He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not āgood enough.ā
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āAs a further example, the test for ID proposed by both Professors Behe and Minnich is to grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory; however, no-one inside or outside of the IDM, including those who propose the test, has conducted it.ā
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āProfessor Behe conceded that the proposed test could not approximate real world conditionsā
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āProfessor Beheās only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies.ā
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āAlthough both Professors Behe and Minnich assert that there is a quantitative aspect to the inference, on cross-examination they admitted that there is no quantitative criteria for determining the degree of complexity or number of parts that bespeak design, rather than a natural process.ā
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āConsider, for example, that he testified as to how Pandas misinforms readers on the standard evolutionary relationships between different types of animals, a distortion which Professor Behe, a ācritical reviewerā of Pandas who wrote a section within the book, affirmed.ā
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āOn cross-examination, Professor Behe admitted that: āThere are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.āā
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āIn that regard, there are no peer-reviewed articles supporting Professor Beheās argument that certain complex molecular structures are āirreducibly complex.āā
I think Beheās testimony did matter, but in hindsight Behe would really prefer (and thus prefers to think) that it didnāt.
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Where can we download the decision?
I found this really helpful comparison between the text of the decision and the ACLU recommendations here.
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Re-reading the decision, I cannot help but wonder whether, in hindsight, they might have been better off firing him anyway. Yes, that would have left them with a gapping hole in their defense, but surely better that than a defense witness who hands the plaintiffs a large chunk of their case on a platter.
Thinking further about his past disputes, and re-reading the decision, I cannot help but think that Behe isnāt the best at shoring up weak positions, either evidentially or rhetorically. He seems to have a tendency to instead go to a stance of āaffronted dignityā, possibly not the best stance for somebody defending what is widely regarded as a fringe position.
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