Harumi

Recently, my brother was working on his Extended Essay, and the topic he was writing about is on the validity of Darwinian evolution.

A few weeks ago he brought me a book which disturbed him greatly. Although I didn't read the book completely, it's conclusion disturbed me as well.

Darwin's Black Box by Michael J. Behe

Has anyone ever read it? If you have, are there any refutations?

If you haven't, here is basically a general overview of what the book is about.

The book rejects the validity of Darwinian evolution. Behe agrees that evolution exists, but he disagrees on how. In the end, he concludes, based on the current evidence, that life must have begun by Intelligent Design. He does this using biochemistry, starting from what he calls "irreducibly complex parts". Take the flagella for instance. It isn't merely a single thing, but many parts all working together. The idea that these things popped up one at a time is ridiculous, and the idea that they all popped up at the same time is so impropable that it's highly unlikely. This unlikelihood has led him to believe that it was by design. He does not say that it is by God, even though he strongly hints that he believes this, but he has provided other examples. Such as aliens, or even time travel. He also adds that the only reason why he concluded design is because it has been proven that we humans can create life. So it may be us that designed ourselves.

As much as I hate to say this, he does have a point. How did something like the flagella evolve? How did single celled organisms become multicellular organisms?

I'm sure that everyone here agrees that there are major flaws in Darwinian Evolution. But what I'm getting at, and hoping for, are explanations. You see, as an atheist and a believer of the evolutionary theory, I want to know if there have been perhaps, books written that counter this. The book was published in 1996, and many things must have past during this time.

I've heard things about the mathematic chaos theory, which theorizes that it is inevitable that humans are formed, since out of chaos there is order, or something like this.

Is there anything else? It would certainly help my brother in his research.

catalyst

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html

Ohio_Infidel

Talk Origins has a nice review here.

[edit] Since catalyst beat me to it here is another good link http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...nism/behe.html

RufusAtticus

Plenty. Try http://www.talkorigins.org and http://www.talkdesign.org.

This is one of the logical problems with Behe's argument. Plenty of the things that he offers for evidence of Intelligen Design were not present in the first organisms, such as an immune system.

Although Behe claims to be arguing against Darwinian Evolution, he clearly has no clue what it is. Hint: natura non facit saltus.

Current investigations indicate that it is a decendent of a secretory pathway.

Division without separation.

There are still important questions about the history of life; however, there is no biological or theoretical evidence that suggests that the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology is majorly flawed.

This is your problem. Evolution isn't a religion. It takes no more "belief" than gravity. Most of us here accept evolutionary theory as the best explaination for the diversity of life that biologists have developed.

No.

Doubting Didymus

Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity are easy to get whitewashed with. The tricky thing about IC is that the fatal flaw in it is hidden away in the fundamental premises, and it isn't obvious enough to be glaring. Once you've swallowed the idea that things that can't be reduced to simplicity in small steps can't be built up from simplicity in said small steps, then he's got you hooked.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways that irreducibly complex systems can be built in small steps. If you think about it, you can't reduce a stone arch very far at all in small steps, but there ARE ways to make one: You could build a pile of rocks, and then remove all but the structural ones, each time adding or removing only one rock. If that doesn't impress you, the following page is a series of functional mousetraps that links a simple curved wire to a modern moustrap in plausible darwinian steps. Note that the finished product is as irreducibly complex as systems get, and of course it's Behes own example of an IC system to boot, which is just adding insult to fatal injury, really.

The Irreducibly Complex Mousetrap.

(sorry to keep bringing this page up, everyone, but it's just such a perfect demonstration of how IC systems can evolve)

Undercurrent

Rufus has pointed out some of the current thinking, but keep in mind that creationists (or whatever Behe calls himself) have for more than a century been pointing to things and saying, "So, smart guy, how did that evolve", where that has been eyes, birds, whales, tetrapods, &c. All of these challenges have been met with new evidence from the fossil record or comparative anatomy. Behe is just another challeneger of this smae line. The only difference is that Behe picks things to challenge that are not as accessable to research; There are no fossils of ancient single-celled organisms and comparaive genetics is in its infancy as a filed of study.

Depends on what you mean by "serious flaws". If you just mean specific evolutionary pathways that haven't yet been researched enough to have their history diciphered, sure. But there is, to my knowlegde, nowhere where the TOE makes a prediction that is in contradiction to known fact, other than in the minds of creationists.

This statement offends me as a mathematician. Chaos theory descirbes the behaviour of the solutions to certain classes of differential equations and dynamical systems. Broader implications have usually been tacked on by ignorant techno-hippies to sell popular science books.

Doubting Didymus

Oh, and one other thing:

I may or may not agree with this statement, depending on exactly what you mean by 'darwinian' evolution. I'd very much appreciate some clarification.

Peter Soderqvist

Kenneth Miller has reviewed Michael Behe's Black Box; he is both orthodox catholic, orthodox Darwinian! http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/ev...iew/index.html

Oolon Colluphid

And, of course, the implication of ireducible complexity is, “oh well, if we can’t find a way for it to have come about naturally, it must have been designed”. Intelligently designed, natch? And the problem with that is, there’s a ton of examples of things in nature that are the product of very unintelligent design. So if you allow a designer in, you need to explain why it buggered off again, and left evolution to produce all its other wonderfully complex designs... and all its half-baked, half-arsed, jury-rigged ‘designs’ too.

Put it this way: if a designer is needed to make a flagellum, why did it make -- or allow to evolve -- something as stupid as a blind spot?

Behe and co are just trying a retread of the old Paley’s Watch argument. The point against which is simply that just because -- even if -- we can’t think of how it could have evolved, it doesn’t mean it didn’t. At its core, irreducible complexity is just a god-of-the-gaps argument.

Cheers, Oolon

Albion

I've seen IDists argue that the type III secretory system evolved from the flagellum, not vice versa. In one thread somewhere they gave an abstract of a paper from PubMed that agreed with their conclusions, but I can't find it in a PubMed search. I know I saw it, though, and it really did seem to support that position. Does anybody know if this is some sort of fringe interpretation of facts or if it's true, as the IDists claim, that the scientific consensus is coming around to this position?