Michael Behe is a fraud. (ID and NYTimes article)

The BBQ Pit
1

Behe could have claimed that he is unconvinced by the studies. He could have said that there were “few” (however he might define that). But instead he said that there were no studies.

This is a lie. And worse, it is a lie that Behe knows is a lie, but tells anyway. Since his publication of Darwin’s Black Box, scientists (including fellow Catholics) have pelted him with examples of exactly these sorts of research studies. Not only were there some when he first made that claim, but since his book, the field has exploded. And indeed, the original claim about the dearth of studies was a little facetious anyway, because at the time, we barely understood HOW most biochemical structures functioned, let alone had had time to start working on how they might have evolved. But nothing can excuse Behe simply acting as if the work of entire careers worth of blood sweat and tears simply did not exist.

Before I might have been able to treat Behe as a serious well-meaning, though highly confused critic. But his article in the NYTimes on Monday was simply devoid of even any AKNOWLEDGEMENT of the very serious criticisms that have been lodged against his core ideas.

Worse, from reading some of the very few articles Behe has written on the subject since his book (he hasn’t really engaged scientists directly since then), he badly misrepresents one of his more prominent critics, the devout Catholic Kenneth Miller, who eviscerated Behe’s arguments for laymen consumption in “Finding Darwin’s God.” In discussing this book, Behe finds time only to mention that this utterly and totally anti-Behe book is written by a Catholic, merely “suggests” that biochemical machines could have evolved, and argues that God performs miracles. This in the course of merely demonstrating that there is “a range of Catholic opinion” on the subject of ID.

Behe and his cohorts may claim that they are not creationists. But they have so many similar phenotypes. Behe is revealed in his NYTimes article and the Ken Miller reference as a shameless quote miner, just like the best YECreationists of old.

Fraud fraud fraud.

Behe and Dembski have repeatedly changed the goalposts on their treasured Irreducibly Complex claim. First it was flat out: IC systems by definition cannot have functional precursors! As it currently stands, they seem to be demanding not even that we describe just the functional pathways that a complex system might have developed from: but actually justify the EXACT cause of the PARTICULAR mutations that led to each and every change along the way and show that it was not impossible by natural means. These guys are shameless, and the evidence is mounting that they are as shameless a pack of liars as ever there was a Henry Morris or a Kent Hovind. And they have pretty much the same bag of tricks too!

2

Excellent rant. I’m glad someone else thinks this way, and can relate the story surrounding the issue more eloquently than myself.

The fact Behe gets published in the NYT at all is troubling enough, as his ID apologetics don’t warrant “Letters to the Editor” inclusion, much less an Op-Ed piece. It’s a sad fact that, in these times of relativist philosophy and right-leaning religiosity, media outlets are under pressure to give a forum to a “diversity of views”, even those that are fraudulent, so long as those views appeal to the spiritual. The God stamp is an automatic seal of legitimacy in the eyes of a vocal few, and ignoring those who oppose legitimate science with such nonsense is, to that “moral minority”, tantamount to bigotry. No newspaper wishes to be labeled an outlet of anti-religious hate, and hence charlatans like Behe get a soapbox the don’t deserve.

3

If I were less ethical, I could become very rich selling the same sort of half-truths and outright deceptions to the credulous faithful.

Damn my conscience, and damn the irony.

4

I can’t add much to the OP except complete agreement. Behe is a crank, and his entire position rests on fallacy and misinformation. He’s just the best the creationists got, because on paper and at a glance he seems like a legitimate scientist.

5

Here’s another gem:

http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_philosophicalobjectionsresponse.htm

This is Behe’s response to the criticism that his basic theory/project is not falsifiable. Read through the first part quickly enough, and see if you can spot what he does.

…

Ready? What he does is quickly try to change the subject from falsifying his theory that there are IC systems at all and this proves design, to people falsifying specific claims of IC in particular systems. Note the disparity between the criticism offered and Behe’s rebutall

Here’s the criticism:
“Even if, after immense effort, we are able to understand the evolution of a complex biochemical pathway, Behe could simply claim that evidence for design resides in the other unexplained pathways. Because we will never explain everything, there will always be evidence for design. This regressive ad hoc creationism may seem clever, but it is certainly not science.”

And here’s how Behe addresses it:
“Coyne’s conclusion that design is unfalsifiable, however, seems to be at odds with the arguments of other reviewers of my book. Clearly, Russell Doolittle (Doolittle 1997), Kenneth Miller (Miller 1999), and others have advanced scientific arguments aimed at falsifying ID. (See my articles on blood clotting and the “acid test” on this web site.) If the results with knock-out mice (Bugge et al. 1996) had been as Doolittle first thought, or if Barry Hall’s work (Hall 1999) had indeed shown what Miller implied, then they correctly believed my claims about irreducible complexity would have suffered quite a blow. And since my claim for intelligent design requires that no unintelligent process be sufficient to produce such irreducibly complex systems, then the plausibility of ID would suffer enormously.”

See the switch? We’ve gone from disproving claims of there being IC in ANY natural organism, which we doubt will ever be absolutely possible, to people rejecting claims of IC in specific instances. Behe says nothing about the core of the criticism: that the theory has tons of “True Scotsmen” escapes to any specific disproof, the simplest of which is simply to claim that the purported IC system was not really IC after all… but hey, how could THIS other system over here have evolved?! While Behe might be right that the credibility of ID would suffer by a high-profile miss, this isn’t the same thing as having or being able to disprove the basic argument that “many” biochemical systems could not have evolved. And if the “well, I was just wrong about that being IC” then the basic argument could be easily salvaged without fear. Coyne’s criticism doesn’t ignore the fact that people try to disprove claims of IC, it in fact explicitly discusses EXACTLY that… and what could happen directly afterwards. And of course Coyne is just here extrapolating a general trend in all god of the gaps arguments.

6

Just as a point of clarification, Dembski and Behe each try to push slightly different flavors of ID down the public’s throats. Behe, of course, prefers the smooth taste of Irreducible Complexity, which essentially just states that complex structures (or some complex structures, or maybe, well, not these complex structures but surely those compex structures) could not evolve via natural selection. Dembski, on the other hand, throws in a heaping helping of Information Theory, twisted beyond even that which spaghetti is capable of, to produce the foul-tasting concoction that is Specified Complexity. Tell me that doesn’t leave a nasty aftertaste…

I don’t have the article handy right now, but Natural History had a special in one of its issues (couple years ago, maybe…?) about Intelligent Design, and they had pieces by Behe, Dembski, and Jonathon Wells, all talking about ID (they followed up each article with a rebuttal by evolutionary biologists). Dembski, in particular, said something about how “we know materialism to be false”, thus his crusade against evolution. Sure, they may claim that the “intelligence” behind ID doesn’t have to be God, but don’t think for a second that they believe it.

It seems to me that the arguments of IDers, and especially Behe, are very much like the “kinds” espoused by YECs: incapable of evolving.

7

My mom showed me this article, asking if I’d heard about this sort of thing before. I recognized the title of the book and decided to inflict the article on myself.

On the one hand I am uncomfortable with advocating anything that looks like silencing opposition. On the other hand the article and others like it (especially that Specified Complexity idiocy I just read) aren’t actual opposition to evolution. They are little more than screeds, no better than “Can your religion explain why God won’t give me a pony? Huh, well can it?”

I’d be very interested to see an intelligent, logical, and scientific challenge to evolution. Just like I’d be interested in such a challenge to quantum mechanics, special relativity, or any of the other theories I’ve studied and try to keep up on. Such challenges play a role in how we get such amazing theories in the first place. ID is not that challenge and never will be.

8

Don’t worry. You still get to be immortal. :smiley:

Behe has been well enough debunked in this forum.

Mainly I am appalled that the NY Times would run an op-ed piece from such a dodgy source. I hope they provide comparable space for a decent rebuttal of Behe’s stupidity.

9

So what are Behe’s motives? Clearly he has the training to see the holes in his arguments. So why does he persist in them? Is he a deliberate fraud, posting false arguments to make money off booksales and lecture fees? Does he simply like the attention, like a message board troll? Is he one of those people who simply can’t admit they’re wrong? Or does he really believe in what he says, for religious reasons maybe?

Any ideas or guesses? I know you all can’t get in his head, but I’ve often puzzled about this.

10

My guess is the notion that the theory of natural selection requires no external agents to adequately explain how structures/systems he deems “irreducibly complex” can arise is somehow threatening to him, and hence we wishes to find a scientific means to argue against it. To claim he has done so putatively confers upon his theories a kind of legitimacy and credibility for both a faithful and agnostic audience. That he had posed specious arguments and engaged in sundry other acts of sophistry may or may not be recognizable to Behe himself. I really don’t care either way.

11

Finch, I’m afraid that any serious analysis of Dembski’s claimed CSI filter and so on simply boils down to Behe’s IC claims. Dembski is oft cited by creationists who claim that ID is legitimate science since things like Dembski’s filter are useful in fields like anthropology and information theory and so on. The problem is, Dembski has never published anything in any journal in these fields, let alone any extended mathematical proof for his rather arrogantly entitled “Law of Conservation of Information.” His definition of “information” is grossly inconsistent both with professional definitions as well as with his own usage, and his methods are simply NOT acknowledged as useful or used in the fields where detecting intelligent agents is important.

Dembski himself basically reduces, in the end, to defending examples of CSI that basically boil down to IC. After all, the basic idea behind CSI works primarily by finding examples in nature where things would require lots of supposedly indepedant improbable events to all happen at once… which is basically IC all over again. If you read his stuff in the 2004 anthology of Scientists who doubt Evolution, this is exactly what you’ll find: him defending Behe by moving the goalposts, as I said.

I still don’t think Dembski or Behe appreciate that you can’t look at evolution backwards through a teleological lens. You can’t argue that complex blood clotting, for instance, was some sort of GOAL of evolution, and thus the probabilities of even the gradual steps to it are thus astronomical. If you look at his calculations, this is exactly what he assumes: not that we go from functional form to functional form in steps that are ONLY justified in terms of current advantage, but that these steps (which he sometimes concedes are gradual) are only justified by some long term direction that is wildly improbable.

12

Man, Apos, you are on top of this! Very impressive, to me anyway. You have far more patience than I to read and pick apart this sort of crap. My hat’s off to you. Well, it would be if I wore a hat. :slight_smile:

13

If this is so, it would be a rather simple matter to demonstrate Dembski and Behe do not understand evolution at all. I’m not sure myself (and some have accused them of having precisely that deficiency), but I suspect they recognize teleology creeping into their arguments, but still insist that, at some point in history, design simply must be there. How and where is completely arbitrary, of course, and this whole line of thinking tends to add a touch of tautology to their arguments, but they appear nonetheless to comprehend and acknowledge the action of random mutation and natural selection in the evolution of what they deem “non-irreducibly-complex” biological structures and systems that are extant. Their theories can only be summed up as “trying to have it both ways”.

14

Well, here’s the gib:

Behe starts out by asserting that there are structures that are IC: that is, they are composed of many parts for which the removal of any would render the system non-functional. A pretty powerfully stated claim.

Scientists point out that the way evolution works is by modification of parts of either lesser functionality or even completely different functions, often later modifying structures so that. An example are earbones: they are modified parts of the jaw that gained new function in amplifying sound. At one point (and we even have fossil evidence of this transition) the bones actually played a dual function. Currently the removal of any of the bones would render the system non-functional, but it’s quite obvious that the system WAS the result of adaptive modification.

Behe counters (changing the goalposts and weakening the claim) that he is not satisfied with this explanation. For instance, in the case of the mousetrap refutation (where a scientist demonstrated how mousetraps with missing parts could still be made to function) Behe argues that to go from the lesser functional systems to the higher ones you have to alter the pieces (bending wire, and so on).

Scientists counter again that this is exactly what mutation (giving the variation from which the more complex forms are selected) DOES to biochemical systems modifies them in slight ways that improve their functionality and open up further possibilities for further slight modification. In fact, there is actually plenty of evidence that biochemical systems are even MORE conducive to these sorts of transitory modifications because proteins turn out to be fairly flexible as far as their functionality: they can start playing new and multiple roles without completely giving up old roles.

Dembski and Behe now switch to asserting that IC structures maybe might have functional intermediaries… and maybe they can arise by slight modification sometimes (though they are still happy to carry on about those systems we don’t yet understand) but that the chances of going from various layered stages of functional intermediaries to the IC system is just highly improbable: akin to the odds of starting from DC, driving by randomly taking turns, and ending up in Brazil.

At this point, scientists just throw up their hands. We’re right back where we started assuming that evolution is basically “trying” to get to a particular functional destination rather than simply accumulating ever more complex modifications to existing structures.

Take blood clotting. Without it, we’d all die pretty darn quickly (even hemophiliacs still have some clotting functionality). Seems like evolution would have had to “know” that it needed to create blood clotting in order to support life like us, right?

Well, that’s assuming that evolution WANTED to create being like us. But the very idea of having blood at ALL wasn’t a necessary one. Certianly, bacteria, which remain the most succesful lifeforms on earth, have no need for it. But even as animals start to come in forms that are too large to function without some sort of transport system, it isn’t like blood clotting needs to come into being full force. First of all, early transport systems were extremely low pressure without actual blood vessels per se: bleeding to death just wasn’t a huge issue. Even some very complex animal life didn’t really need blood clotting like we have it: their systems were, again, much lower in pressure (and hence not liable to squirt out all the blood when punctured) as well as having other mechanisms to deal with breaks (whether simply waiting for cells to grow in over the damage, or having “sticky” white blood cells that played a clotting role in a much simpler fashion.

Clotting, in short, developed gradually right along WITH the evolution of circulatory systems. As clotting advanced, so too could the potential fitness capability of animals with higher pressure systems and also higher metabolisms.

And again, none of that direction is necessary (instead, it builds upon itself, contingently) so calculations of the chance of mutations taking that EXACT path are just flat-out bogus. And yet, those are exactly the sort almost utterly amatuer calculations that someone like Demski makes when he’s arguing about how improbable “particular” mutations are.

Interesting factoid: do you dream of someday us humans developing genetic engineering to the point where we can make people grow ancestrally coded gills so that we can breathe underwater?

Forget it. Our metabolisms are far too demanding. Taking oxygen through the water via gills just wouldn’t cut it for us: water just doesn’t have enough dissolved oxygen that can be taken out fast enough or consistently enough to support our warm, hyper metabolizing bodies. Damn.

15

So Apos, did you write a letter to the editor of the NY Times poking holes in this guy?

16

What good would that do? I have no credentials, and the chance of getting in letters to the editor is astronomically low, not to mention that there would not be enough space to reply in kind. I don’t object to him being given a platform to make arguments. I do hope that other qualified voices will be given a chance to respond. I’ve recently become enamoured of a biologist named Kenneth Miller, who is a devout Catholic who feels that ID is not just bad science, but bad theology too (Miller’s central reconcilliation of his full support for natural evolution with his full support of Catholicism is that it allows God to have his creation be free from his direct influence and control, which is far more core to the Christian message than is the idea that God has to constantly tinker with and break his own natural laws in order to jerry-rig his own creation). I hope someone like him, who has both religious and scientific credentials gets to speak to Behe’s self-serving appeal.

But if not, it’s not a big deal: there are plenty of other fora for a response.

17

Per Apos’ “What good would that do”, Behe’s theory has been fatally debunked by veritable luminaries in the field of Evolutionary Biology and Theory (Richard Dawkins being perhaps the best known living dissenter); and yet he can still get an Op-Ed piece in the NYT published. One needn’t lean on the celebrity of the debunkers; the arguments they make are indeed devastatingly cogent, and Apos has summarized a number of them eloquently. Yet Behe persists, and is still given enough of the benefit of the doubt that his views can occupy coveted space in what is arguably the nation’s most prestigious newspaper. Since Behe is a proponent of both pseudoscience as well as perpaps bad theology, it’s quite reasonable to conclude that no argument is sufficiently persuasive to change Behe’s mind; for it was made up long ago, and is given deference because what informs his logic is a matter of Faith.

18

Behe is proof that the best persuasion is not to present evidence or logic, but to tell people what they want to believe.

19

You will note that I said “slightly different”. Dembski just dresses his version of IC up in bogus information theory (not that information theory is bogus, but rather his application of it).

20

By the way…some folks here might be interested in this. While the battle against ID pseudoscience may not be taking place in the pages of the NYT, it is occurring, and ID is, unsurprisingly, getting a pretty sound thrashing.