Behe has written a very bad book, so poorly supported that I don’t want to waste a lot of time taking apart every sentence, but I did want to say a few words about chapter 9, where he takes on evo-devo. I waited a bit because I knew that Sean Carroll was writing a review of the book for Science, and I expected he’d go gunning for chapter 9, too—but no, he didn’t. I guess he felt as I do, that since Behe’s fatally flawed premise was exposed in the first few chapters, there was little point to addressing his incompetent nit-picks later in the book. After all, when the construction crew has built a foundation of tissue paper in a pool of quicksand, by the time you get around to criticizing the roofers for using graham crackers for shingles, you’re about out of outrage.
I’ll briefly note the best parts of Carroll’s review, though, and I’ll try to gather up a few tired shreds of indignation and exasperation to critique some of the more ridiculous canards of Behe’s evo-devo chapter.
Just to refresh your memory: Behe claims that every single species is explicitly and specifically designed, and the measuring stick he uses to make that claim is the improbability of evolving any molecular interaction that involves even a mere two amino acids. The basis for this grand conclusion is clearly bogus and based on some very poor scholarship. This ought to be enough to demolish the value of the whole book, and Carroll reiterates the main problem.
Behe seems to lack any appreciation of the quantitative dimensions of molecular and trait evolution. He appears to think of the functional features of proteins in qualitative terms, as if binding or catalysis were all or nothing rather than a broad spectrum of affinities or rates. Therefore, he does not grasp the fundamental reality of a mutational path that proteins follow in evolving new properties.
Ironically, though, the main premise of the book is an attempt to turn such black-and-white thinking into a quantitative concept. The “math” (just as what the DI does with “science” necessitates hiding the misuse of the term within quotes, so too we’re going to have to start calling this number-diddling they do “math”) is entirely fallacious. Behe wants to argue that evolution of a two amino acid combination is at the very edge of what is evolutionarily possible, and Carroll annihilates that whole idea with a brilliantly simple explanation.
Very simple calculations indicate how easily such motifs evolve at random. If one assumes an average length of 400 amino acids for proteins and equal abundance of all amino acids, any given two-amino acid motif is likely to occur at random in every protein in a cell. (There are 399 dipeptide motifs in a 400-amino acid protein and 20 x 20 = 400 possible dipeptide motifs.) Any specific three-amino acid motif will occur once at random in every 20 proteins and any four-amino acid motif will occur once in every 400 proteins. That means that, without any new mutations or natural selection, many sequences that are identical or close matches to many interaction motifs already exist. New motifs can arise readily at random, and any weak interaction can easily evolve, via random mutation and natural selection, to become a strong interaction (9). Furthermore, any pair of interacting proteins can readily recruit a third protein, and so forth, to form larger complexes. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that new protein interactions (10) and protein networks (11) can evolve fairly rapidly and are thus well within the limits of evolution.
(It’s bad form to cite articles I haven’t dug into myself, but just in case you want to review the citations yourself, here are the citations referenced above.)
9. V. Neduva, R. B. Russell, FEBS Lett. 579, 3342 (2005).
10. Y. V. Budovskaya, J. S. Stephan, S. J. Deminoff, P. K. Herman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102, 13933 (2005).
11. P. Beltrao, L. Serrano, PLoS Comput. Biol. 3, e25 (2007).
That’s beautiful. What Behe claims is virtually impossible is easily generated by random chance, without even considering the role of selection.
But now, would you believe that Behe already has an excuse, buried within chapter 9? He has read Carroll’s book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful — but doesn’t seem to have understood it — and he makes an effort to criticize it, feebly. Carroll was probably predisposed to make the explanation above because one of the points he made in that book was that binding sites for transcription factors in the regulatory regions of the domain are short, only a few nucleotides long, and therefore common just by chance alone. Behe makes a note of this.
It turns out that, because the regions they bind are so small, developing a binding site for a regulatory protein is too easy. By chance, any particular six-nucleotide sequence should occur about once every four thousand or so nucleotides. Given the enormous length of DNA, there is a great chance that a binding site might already be near a gene. What’s more, the likelihood of having a site that matched five out of six positions—so that only one mutation would be needed to change the last position to make a perfect match—is even better. There should be one of those every few hundred nucleotides.
What a strange blind spot Behe has. He’s a biochemist. He should know something about the genetic code. The above paragraph is correct (although the comment about the enormous length of DNA is weird and irrelevant), and any particular six-nucleotide sequence should pop up frequently. Or to think of it another way, any two three-nucleotide sequences, which is roughly similar to saying any sequences coding for two amino acids (that’s even more likely than a six-nucleotide sequence because of the degeneracy of the genetic code, though). Note that much of Behe’s book is spent telling us just how damnably unlikely a two-amino acid change is. Does talking about regulatory sequences rather than coding sequences justify a radical change in the conceptual likelihood to Behe?
You might object at this point that I seem to be impossible to pleas: Mutations are too rare, when we look at chloroquine resistance to malaria, but now they are too common, when we look at theoretical possibilities for all these genetic switches. Here’s the problem: So many kinds of switches are so common that, if they were the most important factor in determining whether a gene was turned on, the organism would be an incoherent mess. Instead of a fly or a sea urchin or a frog, a developmental program might at best produce a blob of tissue.
Why yes, and bumblebees ought not to be able to fly. That kind of conclusion ought to be interpreted to mean your understanding of the process is incomplete or wrong, not that you’ve discovered a flaw in reality.
Behe’s error is that he has again imposed his black-and-white mentality on the issue. There are lots of switches, and a switch is either in a good or bad position, and therefore if any one of them is bad, kerbloooiee, the animal turns into a blob…therefore, evo-devo is refuted. It’s so wrong that I had to laugh.
Yes, there are a large number of these switches associated with every gene, but most of these switches will not be ultimate activators or repressors—we already know that a single switch is usually not the most important factor in determining whether a gene is turned on, but they will instead contribute incrementally to the pattern of expression. Carroll uses the example of the BMP-5 gene, which has different switches to regulate its expression in the ribs, the omosterna, the thyroid cartilage, and the outer ear. Mutations to a switch don’t cause global collapse of BMP-5 gene expression, or ubiquitous, constant expression everywhere in the body—they fine-tune the pattern of expression, turning it up or down in small regions.
Think of them as more like a mixing board. The sound control guy at an event has a board with a bewildering array of switches and dials and knobs, and sure, there’s an on/off switch—but most of those controls are for tweaking the sound levels at various frequencies or at various speakers around the room. If one turns up the amp on the left midrange speaker, or amplifies the vocalists microphone a bit more than the bass guitarist’s, it does not mean that the entire sound of the room collapses into incoherence.
“Incoherence” is Behe’s new excuse. He admits that he’s got a bit of inconsistency in his explanations, claiming that simple mutations almost never happen, but then claiming that simple mutations in regulation happen all the time, but he’s simply going to wave his hands and say that the evo-devo explanations therefore only produce incoherence, whatever that is. The obvious refutation, though, is that if regulatory mutations are common, as they are and as Behe is forced to admit, and if embryos develop just fine anyway, with just minor variations (which, of course, are then amenable to selection), isn’t it clear that these changes do not produce “incoherence”? The only thing collapsing into an amorphous blob here is Behe’s position.
One last argument from this chapter that I’ll discuss is a particularly tired one that I’ve heard all too commonly from creationists. It’s the argument from surprise.
The argument from surprise is simple. Search through the scientific literature and find instances where scientists express surprise at an unanticipated result — and such instances are everywhere; one doesn’t become a scientist because one knows all the answers, but because one doesn’t — and then use that to declare that therefore their knowledge was grossly incomplete and their guiding theories inadequate. Good theories would give you perfect predictability, right? Scientists would never have to do experiments!
It’s annoying when rank creationists who claim the literal infallibility of the Bible do it — they, after all, believe they have complete and perfect knowledge — but for a purported scientist like Behe to play this game is simply contemptible. He should know that a science that is partly historical like evolution is going to be rich in contigencies, and that sciences that deal with complexities above a few simple elements, you aren’t going to ever see simple solutions. Ask a physicist about the n-body problem; does an expression of surprise at a particular solution mean that physics must be all wrong?
Behe goes on and on about one of the “surprising” results of molecular genetics: that we’ve found a greater degree of conservation of developmental mechanisms than many scientists expected. For instance, it was not predicted that all animals, from sea anemones to teleosts to beetles, would have a core module of Hox genes that regulated pattern formation along the longitudinal axis. Behe accurately quotes many biologists who expected that the rules of development for different body plans would be very different, and who were then surprised when these fascinating genes that Ed Lewis analyzed in flies were so nearly ubiquitous in the metazoa.
“Surprise” is such a nonspecific word, though. There is the kind of surprise you get when you’re unexpectedly laid off from your job and go home early to catch your spouse in bed with the hot UPS delivery person, and then there’s the kind of surprise that a six-year old gets on Christmas morning when she discovers Mom and Dad got her that terrific Lego kit instead of a pair of socks. Developmental biologists experienced something analogous to the latter, rather than the former, although Behe strains mightily to turn the Hox genes into an ugly pair of socks for us.
Before we actually had the detailed molecular data, many scientists expected there would have been so much churning of genomes with mutations that the similarities between distant species would have been obscured. Strangely, though, Behe claims that “reasoning straightforwardly in terms of Darwin’s theory” is what led them astray, which is a bit incomprehensible—Darwin said nothing about molecular biology and very little about genetics (and what he said there was often wrong). We could not have a theory about the pattern of change at the molecular level until, well, we had the data about the molecules in hand. Once we did, then the theories started to build; prior speculation in the absence of evidence is not an indictment of current explanations which are backed up by data.
Now what we’ve got is the evidence, which shows a strong and enduring genetic relationship between different organisms, and what evo-devo is is an effort to explain the developmental mechanisms behind that observation. Behe should understand that; one of his major points is that evidence for common descent, which he accepts, is not in itself evidence for the mechanisms that generate differences between species. He claims the mechanism is intelligent design, but provides no evidence for that. Evo devo, and all of modern biology, says that the mechanisms are natural processes, and the scientific literature is pretty much a massive compendium of nothing but the evidence.
One last bit of contemptible smugness from Behe, and then I’m going to toss his book into my archive of creationist junk.
…it is fascinating to note that the appearance of Hox toolbox components seems to have significantly predated the appearance of new animal forms. As Sean Carroll remarks:
The surprising message from Evo Devo is that all of the genes for building large, complex animal bodies long predated the appearance of those bodies in the Cambrian Explosion. The genetic potential was in place for at least 50 million years, and probably a fair bit longer, before the large complex forms emerged.
Another surprise to the Darwinists! To an intelligent design proponent such as myself, this is a tantalizing hint that parts were moving into place over geological time for the subsequent, purposeful, planned emergence of intelligent life.
Intelligent Design creationists made no such prediction, and their whole sloppy discipline can say anything, and therefore nothing. It is the height of arrogance for Behe to claim he knew it all along; he’s lying, plain and simple.
Furthermore, the surprise of the developmental and evolutionary biologists is partly the fault of the complexity of our disciplines, and the difficulty of getting the big picture of the whole of biology. Our failures to recognize the possibility of greater preceding complexity isn’t a fault with biology, but our own specialization—the microbiologists have been saying for years that there is immense complexity and sophistication in the bacterial world, and we ought to be paying more attention to it. It’s a fair cop to accuse the evo-devo crowd of some degree of nearsightedness, but that is no indictment of evolutionary biology.
That principle of early complexity is now fairly common, as Carroll states—another example is the recent work finding proteins associated with synapses in sponges. However, unlike the Intelligent Design creationists, we do not make the stupid mistake of assuming bacteria and protists were only bearing this complexity because their metazoan descendants would need it—an assumption that is not only arrogant, but that contradicts basic understanding of how molecular evolution works, since it assumes a lineage would retain a “potential” attribute for 50+ million years without degradation—but instead seek explanations that have some respect for the biology. Sponges and choanoflagellates have “post-synaptic proteins” not because mammals need them, but because sponges and choanoflagellates have functional needs for complex cell-cell associations, and more complex multicellular organisms have merely coopted that general functionality for more specialized purposes.
What Behe needed was some evidence for his “purposeful, planned” mechanism, and one thing that did not surprise me at all, that we’ve come to expect from these frauds, these shallow poseurs, and these superstitious corrupters of education and science, is the utter vacuity of their claims and the complete absence of any kind of evidence for their assertions. What is particularly disappointing from someone with scientific training, like Behe, is that their claims are so routinely contradicting the facts of biology. From his phony arguments about the probability of mutations to his misrepresentations of developmental biology, Behe is in defiance of the evidence. The whole book is fundamentally wrong, and the only two possibilities are that Behe is oblivious to his ignorance, or he is aware of the errors and is cynically selling a work of pseudo-scholarship to that large audience of deluded creationists who will welcome it.
Carroll SB (2007) God as genetic engineer. Science 316(5830):1427-1428.
Duly added to the list, which is getting quite long — yay!
It makes sense that IDists would grab onto the idea that complexity originated early on – it’s perfectly consistent with their idea of the designer sticking all the genes for a human in the first primordial bacterium. Not a problem as long as you have some mechanism to ensure that mutations don’t mess with your creation (and that mechanism would be God, the same God that preserved the Bible in its original King James language, from the time Moses wrote it down until today).
Of course, beyond that it gets a little sticky. Did S/He create one bacterium for each modern species/”kind” and then let the programme run its course? Or did S/He intervene every few generations to switch on and off genes? Did I just come up with a new idea, or are there creationists who believe that each “kind” was created as a single-celled organism and let to evolve deterministically to modern species? And if I have just created a new creationist model, will the DI make me a fellow, so I can write a book about it? ;)
I feel bad for his colleagues at Lehigh. Which would be worse, a colleague who’s willfully deluded and/or ignorant, publicly, or one who’s a famous cynical huckster?
It looks pretty close to JAD’s front-loading, although it may not be exactly identi… well, hello VMartin!
Bob
> Which would be worse, a colleague who’s willfully
>deluded and/or ignorant, publicly, or one who’s a
>famous cynical huckster?
How about “all of the above”?
Perfect theories would grant perfect (conceptual) predictability, although specific conditions still couldn’t be anticipated.
But no one claims to know when a theory becomes perfect. Good theories are the best we can hope for – and they’re what we hope to have AFTER applying the scientific method to new data, not before. Every time new information comes in, we enter into a state of uncertainty.
Uncertainty is something the IDiots hate – thus the false claims of certainty about their otherwise unknowable and incomprehensible “designer”.
[bolding added for emphasis]
This is the most interesting comment in your whole review, and one that I think we don’t pay nearly enough attention to. Behe, (and presumably other Iders) accepts common descent. “DaveScot” made essentially the same remark in a discussion on Uncommon Descent that I was following a few months ago. In other words, they apparently agree with mainstream biologists that humans descended from non-human primate ancestors, that cats and dogs had a common ancestor, etc. They just want to inject a supernatural designer into this process instead of trying to explain it in terms of observable natural phenomena.
But for most people who reject evolution, I suspect that they’re not rejecting any particular theory about how it came about, they’re rejecting the whole concept of common descent, they’re rejecting the idea that we had non-human ancestors, or that one “kind” of animal can “turn into” another “kind”. The politicians and preachers and talk-show hosts and school-board members who play to this community like to draw a vague sense of comfort from the work of people like Behe and the DI. It allows them to suggest, without going into a lot of technical details, that smart people in institutes are writing books and publishing papers and doing clever scientific stuff that proves that evolution is wrong. It’s great to be able to tell the flock that we have our scientists too, and they’re just as smart as those evolution scientists.
So every time they try this, it needs to be pointed out: Michael Behe says your great-great-grand-daddy was a monkey, just the same as we do.
Behe reminds me of the student who has quickly skimmed the review article of a topic and has a vague grasp of the basics (proteins bind DNA at specific sites) but has no clue about the incredibly important details. Said student then wants to talk at great length (but not depth) about the topic, throwing in his preconceived notions about how things “should” work.
It also seems that he’s stuck way back in the “genetic switch” era of simple gene regulation of bacteriophage.
I vote for cynically selling a work of pseudo-scholarship. I’ve believed that more and more strongly for quite a while now. It’s simply not plausible that a guy with a respectable background as a scientist actually believes this crap. (And I too feel sorry for his Lehigh colleagues, FSM knows what they ever did to deserve this!)
Crap, I just read on wikipedia that Behe loves Lord of the Rings. Damn it!
Alec: I’m not sure that most IDers actually do accept common descent, not in the sense that most people do. If you read what Wells has to say, I’m pretty sure he’s rejecting common descent pretty much totally. And if you read some of PZ’s latest few posts on Behe’s current book, Behe appears to “accept” common descent, but denies that natural selection can do much more than can do much more than lead to changes within species…he puts every above species-level changes along the “edge of evolution”. It seems he “accepts” common descent, while allowing for less evolution than the average YEC.
Ric wrote:
If you find that disturbing, you really need to stay away from Conservapedia – it seems like just about all the rightwing nuts love LotR. It’s really sad. I suppose they focus on Tolkien as a Christian (albeit, a Catholic who was no fan of Protestantism) and a militant (when, in fact, he was the opposite; if you read his comments in LotR he specifically contrasts the War of the Ring, in which The Weapon (the ruling ring) was destroyed, with WW II, in which The Weapon (the atomic bomb) was taken and used against The Enemy. Sure, JRRT was religious and conservative, but I don’t think he would have been a fan of either the neo- or theocons.
Hey, ID is a big, big tent (only JADavison doesn’t fit in there). As long as Darwin Was Wrong–about something–they’re willing to overlook minor details of ideology like, you know, thousands vs. billions, YHWH vs. aliens, days vs. “days,” etc.
He accepts a peculiar kind of common descent, one that does not allow a natural progression from one species to another. With a little work, it might be possible to make it palatable to your average creationist: instead of making Man from dust, god took a blood sample from an ape into his cosmic lab and by Immaculate Genetic Engineering, made Adam. Then he took a bit of bone marrow from a rib and made Eve. Then he put both his creations back on earth to propagate.
It’s common descent with a creationist flavor.
It is ironic that Behe would use this book to distance himself from Biblical creationists. Judging from the discussions I have seen so far, Behe seems to be walking the same path the creationists took when their movement faltered in the mid-1980s.
Specifically, I am thinking of the long-cherished arguments using the second law of thermodynamics. When criticism of their arguments threatened to overwhelm them, they crossed a point I call “surrendering to the delusion”. Rather then give up and abandon their arguments, the creationists tried to recast (or rewrite) an entire branch of physics. The objections raised by scientists just became noise in the background. They reached a point where reality was made to conform to their world-view and anyone who disagreed suffered from a “misunderstanding”.
I think Behe has reached just such a point. There is no important difference between the views of Behe and the Biblical literalists. They are just two different shades of absurdity.
I’m amused that Behe uses a history of science argument—the “surprise” issue—to criticize mainstream biology, as though ID had some glorious Baconian history full of predictions and verifications. There’s plenty to learn from the history of ID: for example, the way that Dembski, Behe, and Hovind disagree on whether there’s evidence for design in antibiotics resistance (I think that’s no, yes, yes, respectively), or the eye (probably no, no, yes), or the flagellum (yes, yes, yes), or the Grand Canyon (no, no, yes). That disagreement tells us, even without reference to the biology data, that their design-detection tool isn’t very reliable.
Of course, it’s not like they have an algorithm or something. Dembski’s design-detecting tool is Dembski himself. Behe’s design-detecting tool is Behe. (Hovind’s design-detector is pegged in the red.) The point of all this is to say that Behe is an unreliable tool. (I’ll leave it up to Behe’s design-detector to determine whether the pun is intended.)
Doesn’t surprise me at all. After all, LotR contains “a monumental fight of good vs evil”, to quote the Great Decider out of context (…or maybe not out of context).
—————–
“Immaculate Genetic Engineering” is an ingenious way to put it!
Doesn’t surprise me at all. After all, LotR contains “a monumental fight of good vs evil”, to quote the Great Decider out of context (…or maybe not out of context).
—————–
“Immaculate Genetic Engineering” is an ingenious way to put it!
Hey – that’s just what it says in the Bible! Oh no, wait a minute, I’m thinking of the Raelians…
To an intelligent design proponent such as myself, this is a tantalizing hint that parts were moving into place over geological time for the subsequent, purposeful, planned emergence of intelligent life.
Let’s look back on day 11 of KvD, in the late afternoon, during the cross-examination of Behe:
Apparently he still doesn’t. You can’t say that the “Design” that you detect says nothing about the motivations and identity of the designer, and yet slip this in and say that it does.
The fact is, even if a “designer” put those sequences in place, it doesn’t mean that those sequences were intended for a particular purpose. Isn’t whimsy a big part of their worldview? I know this is not, but it still fits the bill – such things, even if planted by a cosmic genetic engineer, could be there because of bumbling mistakes. Like the mistake of contradicting himself in sworn testimony.
My favorite part of Behe’s argument about the Hox genes is that, in an attempt to make a different incoherent argument, he inadvertently demolishes his irreducible complexity argument for ID. The obvious conclusion from the fact that the components of the Hox toolbox were present long before the rise of multicellular organisms is that they were performing functions other than body axis patterning! Carroll makes the same argument with PDZ proteins in sponges. Just another instance of ID proponents failing to keep their “theory” internally consistent.
Actually, Behe didn’t claim he knew all along or that ID had predicted it. He simply sat back and claimed [that’s tough for “Darwinists”, but ID can explain it]. Of course, ID can explain anything. Hox genes present? ID can explain it. Hox genes absent? ID can explain it. So, I agree with Myer’s statement in there that “their whole sloppy discipline can say anything”.
I was somewhat puzzled by Behe’s common descent argument and also the notion of intentionally desgined malaria. I decided to ask a Christian what he thought of Behe’s arguments (as I expressed them). He was somewhat sceptical on theological grounds, for example saying:
“It almost comes across (to me) as a sort of double predestination. Not only are good people to be healthy, but bad people get bad viruses. Not just destined for eternal heaven or damnation, but health/no-health in this life as well.
Does that make it quadruple predestination? Only Calvin knows.”
Now, I imagine most people here don’t care about this! However it does go to show that Behe might also recieve a bit of theological resistance to his ideas from his target audience.
Eh, I’m always interested to hear well-reasoned theology, even if most apologetic arguments remind me of the old C&H cartoon in which Suzie Derkins admits that, as long as she’s dreaming, she’d like a pony (http://imgred.com/http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/ch/1987/ch870113.gif), except in the case of apologetics, as long as one is re-interpreting scripture (ie making it up as one goes along) to fit one’s own idea of what god should be, one might as well throw in a pony, or an ice cream cone (for apologetics on hot days.)
On a different tack, have any ID proponents ever specifically suggested how the application of ID makes predictions or could lead to advances in other scientific fields?
“On a different tack, have any ID proponents ever specifically suggested how the application of ID makes predictions or could lead to advances in other scientific fields?”
How the what makes what or leads to what in the what?
After getting through with all that, I have to say that Behe surpassed all the hypothetical caps I had put on his stupidity.
Oops, I’ll try to be clearer, Rey.
Have Behe, Dempsky, or any of their chums ever made specific claims as to the predictability of intelligent design or it’s applicability to medicine, ecology, or any other fields?
For example, have any of them ever said, “look, we can prove that the immune system is irreducibly complex, so therefore we should look into x as a possible way to create a vaccine that gives complete immunity to HIV” or “by determining that the bacterial flagellum is designed, we know have insight into better ways to produce GM foods” or anything like that?
I’m pretty sure they haven’t, but I’d like to know how they’d respond if someone ever said to them, “Okay, I’m sold. Now use your theory of ID to cure cancer.”
Um, the ‘know’ in the third para of my comment above should be a ‘now’.
Sorry, but it’s Friday afternoon, and I’m getting lazy.
Well, PZ can’t even get his stupidity published so I guess Behe has a few steps in front of him.
Yep, Behe’s waaay out in front in publishing his stupidity.
He must be very proud.
Behe shouldn’t have looked for his edge, he immediately fell off. Though since he didn’t start from very far up, I’m sure he will pick up the same pieces in his next book.
The post is revealing, since it exposes most of the problems in Behe’s thinking. The main problem with him pointing on something and spelling “goddidit”… excuse me, “IC”, seems to be that he expects real theories to be equally easy.
Btw, much demands more – I was expecting to keep seeing the Behe Knight dismembered through the post, so I was dissatisfied when he didn’t return. But as I mentioned above I know that Behe himself isn’t that easily dispatched though. He won’t miss trivial stuff like lost heads or reputations but will come back and write the same book again.
Oh yeah? Well, seems ERV has found an example with 5 mutations building a bridge across a fitness valley.
Explain away that, Behe! Quick, before your incompetent reading of literature is revealed… oops, too late, again.
Never positive predictions AFAIK, only negative claims. For example, on a related Good Math, Bad Math thread (which I’m too lazy to google for) a creationist currently complains that genetic algorithms (GA’s) are useless. He wants to make ‘ID’ algorithms, i.e. algorithms designed for a specific problem, as the best in all situations.
The problem with that is of course that GA’s can be useful when we encounter new or complex problems which we don’t yet know how to attack. They are like a monkey wrench for us. (And for creationist ideas. :-)
Behe shouldn’t have looked for his edge, he immediately fell off. Though since he didn’t start from very far up, I’m sure he will pick up the same pieces in his next book.
The post is revealing, since it exposes most of the problems in Behe’s thinking. The main problem with him pointing on something and spelling “goddidit”… excuse me, “IC”, seems to be that he expects real theories to be equally easy.
Btw, much demands more – I was expecting to keep seeing the Behe Knight dismembered through the post, so I was dissatisfied when he didn’t return. But as I mentioned above I know that Behe himself isn’t that easily dispatched though. He won’t miss trivial stuff like lost heads or reputations but will come back and write the same book again.
Oh yeah? Well, seems ERV has found an example with 5 mutations building a bridge across a fitness valley.
Explain away that, Behe! Quick, before your incompetent reading of literature is revealed… oops, too late, again.
Never positive predictions AFAIK, only negative claims. For example, on a related Good Math, Bad Math thread (which I’m too lazy to google for) a creationist currently complains that genetic algorithms (GA’s) are useless. He wants to make ‘ID’ algorithms, i.e. algorithms designed for a specific problem, as the best in all situations.
The problem with that is of course that GA’s can be useful when we encounter new or complex problems which we don’t yet know how to attack. They are like a monkey wrench for us. (And for creationist ideas. :-)
Behe needs to make up his mind whether he wants a tinkerer God or a wind-up God. The tinkerer is the guy who patches things up at every step along the way, the latter is the evo-devo God whose first organisms had the basic programming for Adam and Eve from the very beginning.
Have Behe, Dempsky, or any of their chums ever made specific claims as to the predictability of intelligent design or it’s applicability to medicine, ecology, or any other fields?
I think they’ve predicted that all ‘junk DNA’ has a purpose. Their basis for doing so is somewhat dubious – even if we are assuming ID is true, it doesn’t mean that ‘junk DNA’ must have a purpose. For example, Behe claims to believe in common descent. What if junk DNA has slowly accumulated by mutations, passed down over millions of year, and God never cleared it out? Voila – you now have purposeless DNA. ID cannot *predict* that all junk DNA has a function unless they know that God is faithfully doing housekeeping on every organism’s DNA.
Further, if we accept ID and accept Behe’s claim that Malaria is designed, then it has some applicability to disease and epidemiology: God (or angels, devils, or some other supernatural designer) are probably going to come up with some nasty diseases in the future. Perhaps it’s worthless to even find cures for diseases – it might just make our supernatural overlords that much angrier and more resolute to cut us down with some new disease.
Malaria is God’s way of showing that he loves mosquitos more than man.
http://thestubborncurmudgeon.blogspot.com
The thing that is especially goofy about Behe and evo-devo is that biologists weren’t surprised because the deep homologies in regulatory and developmental genes shouldn’t be there but because in their wildest dreams they couldn’t have hoped that the story of evolution would be written in those genes in such a big, blaring, gaudy, 100,000 point font. When I was reading ‘The Plausibility of Life’ I kept thinking ‘Well, this just makes the whole thing too easy.
One nice thing is that some reviews at Amazon are incorporating the criticisms here and elsewhere (notably at the Thumb). Hopefully, that will hit Behe at least a little bit where it will actually hurt, in his wallet. Clearly, the ridicule of the scientific community and its fans doesn’t matter to him.
one doesn’t become a scientist because one knows all the answers, but because one doesn’t.
Quite right. Anyone who doesn’t get excited by have to utter the phrase “that’s wierd!” shouldn’t be doing science. I don’t think Behe is doing science anymore.
Ha! Behe taking on Sean Carroll? That’s not even a fair fight!
“Have Behe, Dempsky, or any of their chums ever made specific claims as to the predictability of intelligent design or it’s applicability to medicine, ecology, or any other fields?”
Well, here’s Behe making some such claims:
So, ID is not actually going to help us find any cures, but ID tells us not to worry about it too much. Gee, that sounds really responsible.
And what’s to stop the Designer from creating new disease organisms to bother us? Didn’t HIV originate in the 1930s? How does Behe explain it?
Here is how you use ID to cure cancer.
Everything about humans was designed, including that you would specifically get the specific cancer that you got. Obviously that happened for a reason, and the reason is so that you would give me money so that you would be cured.
You were designed to get cancer, I was designed to be the receptical for the money which would stop the cancer.
Unless you give me all of your life-savings, I cannot say you will be cured. Of course, the longer you delay, the more likely that even even giving me all your money will not be effective.
Daedalous2u, here’s how ID will reduce the number of human cancer cases: We will enter a new Dark Age, where everybody dies of old age at 40 or 45, thus not living long enough to get many cancers.
Speaking of sick ID humor: If ID prevails, the Periodic Table will have only four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. And the practice of psychology will be greatly simplified – the DSM VI will list only four diagnoses: melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, and sanguine.
PZ,
Your “sound board” analogy is excellent. Small shadings make a big difference.
“One heartening conclusion of intelligent design is that Darwinian evolution is not the relentless, Borg-like process we had thought. Random evolution is clumsy and limited. That means that, even when fighting pathogens such as malaria that occur in enormous numbers, if science can find the right monkey wrench to throw in its molecular machinery, random mutation and natural selection will be helpless to circumvent it.”
It’s cruel, but I can’t help thinking that if someone has to come down with one of the various multiply resistant bugs floating about this, it would be fitting if it were Behe.
Carroll tells in his review us that many in the public, and many scientists ( espcecially if they are not molecular biologists) may not be able to understand his answer to Behe. But he, The Great Sean Carroll is going to set us straight!
If thats the case, just how IS the general public supposed to be informed.
Take it on “faith”?
No. Read the review. Behe’s book is an act of fraud that pulls off some devious sleight of hand that those not aware of what’s known in molecular biology … and then the rest of the review explains what Behe’s mistake was. Carroll is not saying the public won’t understand his answer, he’s saying that Behe is misinforming, and then he proceeds to inform the general public on the facts.
That’s how the public is supposed to be informed — by scientists showing and discussing the evidence.
I think it is time, and now justifiable, that the academic community petition Lehigh University to censure Behe, if not relieve him of his position, for academic fraud. Tenure be damned – there’s a first time for everything. He has gone beyond the point of being an embarassment, and it can not be that he is as stupid as he seems. The logical conclusion is that he is willfully using his position of credibility to defraud the public.
Apart from teaching at various colleges, I am a licensed professional geologist. We operate under a code of ethics on behalf of the public. I am a commissioned member of the State Board for licensure and I can tell you that this Behe clown would have his license revoked for the things he is allowed to get away with under his “academic license”.
Perhaps rather than trying to pry into Lehigh’s politics, we should become earnest in our own census. Rather than the comical and brilliant ‘Steve’ list we should construct a censure statement against Behe from concerned scientists, request signatories from all the lists and groups and blogs and submit it on our own to Lehigh’s governing board so they can assess his ability to attract serious graduate students and research money to the university in the future.