Steven Carr

On page 159 of 'The Blind Watchmaker', Richard Dawkins writes 'A miracle is something which happens, but which is exceedingly surprising.If a marble statue of the Virgin Mary suddenly waved its hand at us we should treat it as a miracle , because all our experience and knowledge tells us that marble doesn't behave like that.'

I quote (p249) of Behe's Black Box:

"In The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins tells his readers that even if a statue of the Virgin Mary waved to them, they should not conclude
they had witnessed a miracle. Perhaps all the atoms of the statue's arm just happened to move in the same direction at once - a low
probability event to be sure, but possible. Most people who saw a statue come to life would tell Dawkins that there are more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy, but they couldn't make him join the Church of England."


Dawkins goes on to write (p162) about hypothetical long-lived aliens
'But even they will blench if a marble statue waves at them, for you would have to live dealions of years longer than even they do to see a miracle of this magnitude.', yet Behe insists Dawkins tells his readers a waving marble statue of the Virgin Mary should not be considered a miracle.

Dawkins says a natural explanation is as likely as a cow jumping over the moon, yet Behe still wrote what he did, claiming Dawkins tells his readers they should not treat its as a miracle.

Splat

This is an exceedingly important insight AbbyNormal. There are thousands of PhD-trained biology professors in the world, and tens of thousands of peer reviewed and published papers that depend upon or are consistent with evolution. There are a handful of PhD-trained ID proponents, and their supporters outside of academia hold them up as paragons. None of them, certainly not Behe, have widespread recognition recognition within biology, except perhaps as annoyances. They pose no problems that the academic community finds compelling and worthy of attention. They solve no problems. They are irrelevant, except for the fact that they are having a disproportionate negative impact on the training of future biologists.

Albion

Acually, all serious scientists are committed to naturalism within the boundaries of the scientific method. I think ever scientist who has written about the creation-evolution debate from the evolution point of view has stated that. They've also stated that the methodological naturalism used in science is part of a method and is not a worldview. Scientists with all sorts of worldviews, from Dawkins's aggressive atheism to Gould's agnoticism to Dobzhansky's Christianity, all use naturalism as part of the scientific method.

One of the favourite (and less than honest) tactics of the IDists is to say that methodological naturalism as used in science, which says that science is looking for explanations in terms of natural causes while remaining neutral on the subject of supernatural creators, is exactly the same as philosophical naturalism, which says that natural causes are all that exist and there are no supernatural creators. It looks as if your friend is pulling that stunt. Just ask him what his problem is with God using the very natural proceses that he created in the first place. Ask him why he has this need for God to bypass his own processes and leave "hey, God was here!" clues everywhere.

DNAunion

DNAunion: Wrong for more than one reason.

First, Behe does use a sound argument; and second, contrary to what you assert, Behe does NOT claim that an IC system cannot evolve. Perhaps it is your misunderstanding on the second part that leads you to your incorrect understanding on the first one.

Let me set you straight.

In his 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution", Behe explicitly states that circuitous evolutionary routes to IC biochemical systems could exist and that IC biochemical systems could have formed by such routes: so he does NOT claim that an IC biochemical system CANNOT evolve.

What Behe CORRECTLY states and argues is that an IC biochemical system cannot form by means of a direct, incremental route through simpler functional precursors.

DNAunion: Wrong again - strike 3, you're outta there!

Behe mentions the idea of exaptation/co-option several times in "Darwin's Black Box".

What strikes me is how assured and authoritative Behe detractors almost always are, yet they don't even know what Behe actually says. Look, if "you guys" are going to try to refute Behe, at least try to do so with knowledge and honesty - not out of ignorance or bias.

[ November 21, 2002: Message edited by: DNAunion ]</p>

pz

...which admission immediately reduces his entire argument to a pointless shambles.

This is the heart of the dishonesty in Behe's thesis. He wants to suggest that he is seriously challenging evolutionary biology, and all of his writings and his talks are geared to give that impression. Unfortunately for him, biologists don't ever argue that evolution is linear, direct, or by ever-increasing complexity.
<strong> I'm quite aware of what Behe has written. He gives sporadic lip service to the reality of biology, entirely so people like you can point to isolated quotes and pretend that he has covered all of the bases. The thing is, if he actually had presented these topics like exaptation adequately, there would have been no point to writing his book. Either Behe destroyed his own claims, or we're doing it for him now, but either way, IC is dead.

DNAunion

DNAunion: So Richard Dawkins isn’t a biologist?!?!?

pz

Yes, he is. And he doesn't argue for what you claim. Do you really think he gives ID any creedence at all?

Principia

No, the more salient point is that you are not a biologist.

Nic Tamzek

PZ has nailed the general state of affairs straight-on, but I would point out that even DNAunion's most confident claim ain't true:

Loss of scaffolding is just such a route. E.g. the evolution of the Venus' Flytrap, stage by stage. Selection is in the same direction continually: for improved trapping and trapping of larger insects.

1) Leaf

2) Increasingly sticky leaf, primitive carnivorous plant. There is of course a continuous scale of stickiness (plus a lot of noncarnivorous plants and dubiously carnivorous plants that are sticky for other reasons, showing the validity of the starting stage; example: Roridula). No movement necessary to be a functional carnivore (examples: Drosophyllum, Triphyophyllum)

3) Add moving leaf to enhance trapping and retention of digestive/prey juices.

Example of very slow mover (days): Pinguicula

Example of faster mover: Drosera (closing speed varies within the genus from hours to under a minute; the faster traps have elongated outer tentacles and shorter inner ones)


4) Once the active trapping by motion is fast enough, lose the sticky glue, now unnecessary. Now, trigger hairs (remnant of center tentacles), outer spikes (remnant of outer tentacles), and hinge (middle of the trap) are all necessary parts for functional trapping.

Losing the glue is "removing the scaffolding".

Example: Dionaea (venus flytrap).

So, bingo, a multiple-parts required system, at least as impressive as Behe's mousetrap, that even resulted from gradual evolution under the selective pressure for a single unchanging function (what Behe means by 'direct').

Guess who figured the basics of this one out? Good ol' Chuck Darwin, and lucky for us his book on the topic is now online:

<a href="http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/insectivorous/insect15.htm" target="_blank">Darwin, Insectivorous plants. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1875</a>

More discussion of the evolution of carnivorous plants:

The Venus Flytrap - Irreducibly Complex, or Just Plain Weird?
<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000967" target="_blank">http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000967</a>

And as if this weren't enough, recent literature on carnivorous plants has confirmed the basic scenario touched on by Darwin and explicated in fuller detail by e.g. Juniper et al. (Carnivorous Plants, 1989). The sequencing work in particular has confirmed Darwin's view of the evolution of snap traps over other suggested possibilities:


And, pretty please, don't argue that this example can be ignored because IC only applies to molecular systems. IC is a scale-invariant concept. This is proven by Behe's own examples of IC, e.g. mousetraps, bicycles, rube-goldberg devices, snares in the woods made from sticks and vines (how much closer an analog to the carnivorous plants case can one get!!!). Even cilia are a long ways from the molecular level -- some of them are centimeters long! (E.g., fruit fly sperm tails). And the immune system of course is more of an organ than a molecular system...

PS: I should add that I think that the most common mechanism for the origin of IC is change-of-function (as emphasized...repeatedly...by Darwin in OoS, directly following Darwin's bit about "numerous, slight, successive modifications" that Behe quotes at the beginning of his argument -- yet another reason that Behe has no excuse for essentially ignoring change-of-function).

But even DNAunion's limited claim here -- fatal to the ID movement's reliance on Behe if accepted, BTW, since it means that IC can evolve naturally after all -- turns out not to be true.

Cheers,
nic

Tom Ames

Excellent job, Nic! Seems to have become the final word on the matter.

Which is a shame, because this thoughtful post deserves to hang around at the top of the queue a bit longer.