tgamble

"In fact, my argument for intelligent design is open to direct experimental rebuttal. Here is a thought experiment that makes the point clear. In Darwin’s Black Box (Behe 1996) I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design.

The flip side of this claim is that the flagellum can’t be produced by natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process. To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure (for mobility, say), grow it for ten thousand generations, and see if a flagellum--or any equally complex system--was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven."

"Let’s turn the tables and ask, how could one falsify the claim that, say, the bacterial flagellum was produced by Darwinian processes? (Professor Coyne’s remarks about a Precambrian fossil hominid are irrelevant since I dispute the mechanism of natural selection, not common descent. I would no more expect to find a fossil hominid out of sequence than he would.) If a scientist went into the laboratory and grew a flagellum-less bacterial species under selective pressure for many generations and nothing much happened, would Darwinists be convinced that natural selection is incapable of producing a flagellum? I doubt it. It could always be claimed that the selective pressure wasn’t the right one, or that we started with the wrong bacterial species, and so on. Even if the experiment were repeated many times under different conditions and always gave a negative result, I suspect many Darwinists would not conclude that the claim of its Darwinian evolution was falsified."

<a href="http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_philosophicalobjectionsresponse.htm" target="_blank">http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_philosophicalobjectionsresponse.htm</a>

[ November 27, 2002: Message edited by: tgamble ]</p>

Vibr8gKiwi

How would that falsify anything to creationists? If such an experiment succeeded (despite the fact evolution isn't directed), they would just find another supposedly "irreducibly complex" thing and demand another experiment. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The simple fact is evolution can produce seemlingly "irreducibly complex" things so Behe is just wrong.

[ November 27, 2002: Message edited by: Vibr8gKiwi ]</p>

tgamble

Of I know that. I just thought folks here might find it interesting.

Principia

How does one falsify with negative evidence? Say I have a hypothesis that cats are natural predators of mice. I conduct an experiment, where I put a mousee and a cat in a confined area. I come back in a couple of days and find the mouse still alive. Is my hypothesis falsified?

EDIT:
What prevents him from then declaring that the flagellum was not IC in the first place, and then reselecting a different subcomponent of the flagellum? Wasn't this his mode of argument against MacDonald's mousetrap illustration?

EDIT: Oops... I retract the bit about MacDonald's mousetrap -- apparently Behe is arguing something else there. Does anybody have a better idea about the IC falsifiability argument?

[ November 27, 2002: Message edited by: Principia ]</p>

simian

If I remember what little I have read of Black Box (or perhaps Behe's follow-up articles) correctly, he has already stated that "if this is shown to be obtainable by Darwinian methods, then this or anything less complex is not the product of intelligent design" (poorly paraphrased). I read this as "when this is disproven, I will push my god even farther into the gaps.

Simian