Sheesh. He’s so metaphysical. And this is where it gets confusing. Random automatically means epicurean and atheistic? Not helpful. That’s why our discussion of definitions is important!
2 Likes
I would agree that IC is the result of purposeful design by God…most likely as a final cause, whose vision of the flagellum, etc. was accomplished through secondary natural causes like exaptation, lateral gene transfer, symbiogenesis, developmental bias, transposition, etc. Does that make me a Beheist, or not? I don’t know. Hopefully this stuff will really be cleared up when he responds to the onslaught of negative reviews he’s gonna get. If I’m a Beheist, then pretty much everyone actually agrees with Behe and he is, as @swamidass always says, “tilting at windmills.” Since no one is an extreme Darwinist anymore anyway.
1 Like
An interview with Behe:
“Q: I understand your current position to be that design is detectable in nature, and that design detection is not merely a theological gloss upon the scientific facts, but is actually an activity appropriate for science. I further understand you to be saying that design detection in itself is neutral regarding the way that the design found its way into nature. Thus, if the bacterial flagellum is designed, it could be that God took a regular bacterium and miraculously “tweaked” it, or it could be that God “front-loaded” the evolutionary development of the bacterial flagellum, in a manner similar to that suggested by, say, Michael Denton. Design detection as a science cannot rule on these things; all that it can show is that Darwinian mechanisms, all by themselves, could not have produced integrated structures such as the flagellum. If there was not direct intervention (tweaking, guiding, steering, etc.) or advance planning (“front-loading”), neo-Darwinian processes would never have been able to produce all the complex varieties of living things that we see today. Have I got your current position correct?
Me: Yes, that’s exactly right”
https://evolutionnews.org/2009/11/god_design_and_contingency_in/
If it’s front loading, then like I said, what is everyone arguing about? No one is saying Neo-Darwinism CAN explain IC. Virtually no one can destroy his claims of IC then, and his project is rather unexciting.
Behe is using “Darwinism” as shorthand for all evolutionary processes. Don’t get hung up on that word. It isn’t clear what front-loading would actually entail, and it’s sufficiently vague that it could mean something quite different to you than to Behe, and probably does. I think he leans heavily toward the “tweak” explanation and considers front-loading to involve tweaks too, just earlier, before the actual evolution of the flagellum. What does “advance planning” mean otherwise? Planning by itself accomplishes nothing.
Is that something Behe says or is that something that you made up?
What’s your opinion?
Yes, THIS! Having read all three of his books over the past few months, this is something that annoyed me throughout. Behe conflates evolution with natural selection all the time and calls it all “Darwinism” and “Darwinian.” Darwinism, if it means anything, refers only to natural selection, and we now know that there are so many more evolutionary forces than that. Seeing all of evolution through the sole lens of natural selection is a a form of hyper-adaptationism. Despite the science that Behe ignores about mutations and other sources of genetic diversity, he also describes evolutionary theory in a very insufficient way. He is constantly arguing against positions that no one holds anyway.
7 Likes
Behe doesn’t seem to agree with this worldview. He has stated multiple times that he wouldn’t expect to see IC systems evolving in the lab, but that is certainly a possibility in the Denton/Lamoureux style ID theory.
That is a bit problematic since that is not how biologists define random with respect to mutations. What biologists mean by random mutation is that there is no known or detectable mechanism that creates specific beneficial mutations in response to environmental challenges. At the same time, different types of mutations are more likely than others, such as transition mutations being more likely than transversion mutations. Large indels are also less likely than small indels.
These are the types of issues that biologists will be thinking about when reading Behe’s book.
2 Likes
Excellent assessment. You highlight the main problem. Behe says different things at different times. And you are absolutely right. Under Denton, we should be able to evolve pretty much anything in a lab under the right conditions. It’s completely unclear to me whether Behe allows for this possibility. Perhaps he is purposely elusive on this point because if he says that we should be able to evolve IC systems in a lab, then he would probably go out of the news and not cause the hype that he currently causes. As with R. Kelly, any pubicity is good publicity. More people will read Behe’s book and more people will listen to R. Kelly’s music because of the controversy. Anyways…
1 Like
As long as the book sells to his scientifically illiterate target audience and makes him money do you think Behe cares?
2 Likes
The Lenski LTEE pretty much killed the “front loading” idea. There were 12 colonies of E coli all stated from a single cloned E coli bacterium so they all began as genetically identical. Each of the 12 colonies was subjected to identical selection pressure but each produced a different and unique evolutionary pathway, with the one colony evolving the well known citrus digesting feature. If front loading were true we’d expect to see all 12 colonies follow the same evolutionary paths and produce the same results, but we didn’t.
1 Like
As a sidenote, it looks rather plausible that given the right conditions and enough time, we COULD evolve a flagellar motor in a lab:
" One of the most interesting, and especially important because of its misappropriation by the proponents of the scientific fiction referred to as ‘intelligent design’, is the independent evolution of the flagellar motor in either bacterial group (e.g. Thomas et al . 2001; Trachtenberg et al . 2005)."
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2009.0154
If it evolved independently more than once, are we supposed to imagine God miraculously intervening in the same way multiple times? This is certainly possible, but it seems a bit ad hoc to me. Instead, this seems to be evolution through natural law.
@Timothy_Horton, evolution through natural law doesn’t have to mean evolution through 100 percent determintive processes. But you bring up an interesting point.
This is what Behe had to say:
That would seem to rule out the possibility of front loading.
2 Likes
That was Behe blowing smoke and grandstanding as he usually does. Behe knew that 1) no scientist was going to waste time and money on such a ridiculous endeavor and 2) even if some scientist managed the feat it wouldn’t disprove Intelligent Design as a whole, it would only disprove the claim a flagellum couldn’t evolve.
1 Like
Perhaps that’s why he seems to waffle back and forth. One claim is falsifiable while the other one is simply a philosophical/metaphysical/theological inference that could be argued about forever. Either way, I don’t think they constitute science proper whether or not the second one is true. Hence, a PHILOSOPHICAL inference.
I have a question. I get the impression that in the UK (and perhaps some other countries) the word Darwinism is commonly used as a synonym for evolutionary biology in general, even by many scientists. Perhaps someone with experience in the UK can comment on this. Is it a common synonym for evolution, even among scientists?
I’m a visiting professor at a university in the UK and so I’m there twice a year for about six years now. I don’t recall any differences with this, but I’ll confess to not paying specific attention and I’m usually there doing research and teaching in forensic science, so it doesn’t come up as much. It is true, however, that the sloppiness with terminology is in no way specific to the ID community and many scientists get lazy also. I’ve caught myself doing it. I do think it’s reasonable to expect Behe to get it correct when he’s in the midst of criticizing it, however.
5 Likes
Just curious… it seems that the above-described experiment would only literally rule out “irreducible complexity.” Not ID, per se. Because ID does not say that any particular thing that may have been designed, could not have evolved, does it? Obviously, this begs the question of why God would design something that could have evolved, but that’s a separate issue. I’m merely questioning as to whether or not this would truly rule out “front-loading” or just the irreducible complexity aspect (and his opinion on natural selection’s ability to produce the flagellum.) Behe says: “I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection…” and so his claim would be found to be incorrect, but I’m not sure that any of this rules out the possibility of front-loading. Am I wrong?