# Is the book "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael J. Behe the end of evolution? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 18, 2003, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059 "2003-08-18T21:57:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/81 "2003-08-19T22:11:18Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Brad Amundsen \* > \*\*In reply to tars tarks > Read the book it explains it very well. To shorten what is said in the book on irreducible complexity is to sell it short. > > It does resemble the watchmaker arguement but gives specific biochemical examples of things like the watch (such as the human eye) that are so complex you cannot reduce them to indiviual parts that could have been evolved. In other words there are parts in the human eye that require several other parts and systems to work as one.Missing one ,the whole system collapses.So in order for the eye to have been evolved the mutation would have to have been all of these parts at once and is beyond probability of happenning. > > Believe me I don’t do it justice > > I would prefer comments from people who have read part or are somewhat familiar with the book. \*\* Aha, now I know, thanks for this post. A friend of mine ask his doctor if he believed in evolution. He said no, because of the human eye. So, he must have read the book or reached the conclusion on his own. Been wondering a while about that one. I never have believed in evolution, it just can’t be known. No one can know accurately what happened millions of years ago. We can guess, but nothing more than that. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/82 "2003-08-19T22:21:38Z")
> [@](#): > > He said no, because of the human eye. So, he must have read the book or reached the conclusion on his own. Actually, Darwin, himself, was honest enough to raise the issue of the eye. Of course, he actually proposed a solution to the problem and his anti-scientific opponents have been trying to use his “objection” (while carefully ignoring his defense and the huge amount of data that has been discovered to support the evolution of the eye) ever since. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/83 "2003-08-19T22:27:59Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic \* > \*\*Give a specific example of a question you think evolutionary science can’t answer. > > Give a specific example of something you think falsifies evolutionary theory. \*\* OK, fine. How does a _reproducing_ system of metabolism arise spontaneously? Forget eyes & antibodies, that’s chickens\*\*t. Where was the first cell wall? The first ADP-ATP cycle? And the big one: At what point does a bunch of ribonucleic acid start reshaping its surroundings? How do we have life on this planet, dependent on conditions on this planet, _when life does not appear spontaneously in those conditions?_ Evolutionary science, in the sense of _what we know_, doesn’t have those answers. Evolutionary _theory_ can guess. That’s fine, it should. Maybe it will eventually figure it out. But that kind of (very laudable) “evolutionist” speculation—that search for workable explanations—isn’t proof of anything. It’s _not_ falsifiable, by sheer definition, because it’s a supposition by which new speculation is formed. In some quarters, the biggest scientific objection to theistic design is its unfalsifiability; but a belief that atheism can answer everything—when it hasn’t yet—is also a supposition. It may be correct, but the data aren’t in. Behe, whatever his faults, has a point: There are things we do know that don’t make biogenesis or macro-evolution _easy._ There’s something at work that we don’t quite understand. And given (a) the apparently teleological function of nucleic acid, and (b) the very existence of our own consciousness; a man could be forgiven for thinking that there is a fundamental “mind” at work in the universe—or, loosely speaking, God. ---
**Author:** ![Darwins\_Finch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darwins_finch/32/20304_2.png) [@Darwins\_Finch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darwins_Finch)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/84 "2003-08-19T22:51:07Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Mr. Svinlesha \* > **Mr. Finch: > Okay, back to the debate:Actually, what the Prof is pointing to, if I understand correctly, is something known – that these specific chemicals are incompatible except in the very specific conditions of a cell, and that this poses a quandary, since in order for the cell to develop, these chemicals must be combined first.** I think perhaps we misunderstand each other. The “known”, in this case, is simply the observation. It may be an anomaly, or it may not - that isn’t my point. My point is that at this time, we may not have an explanation for how it came to be that way. That is the “unknown” I refer to: the pathway by which that system might have evolved. And that is precisely what **Prof** expected us to provide. Such pathways, if we wish to stay completely out of the realm of conjecture, require a significant amount of data to support – data which may well not be available at this time, or ever. My point is that this lack of knowledge regarding specific cases does not necessarily undermine the general case. > [@](#): > > **At the very least, since evolutionary theory is supposed explain things like the origin and development of cells, this problem (provided he’s not just making it up as he goes along, of course) must be considered to be something of anomaly.** However, things get very murky the smaller, or farther back, we go. So, it is not surprising that we do not yet have all the answers (which is not to imply that we _will_ someday have all the answers…). I still don’t think such instances do much to disprove evolution, or pinpoint any flaws with it. > [@](#): > > **As far as I can tell, your response is to claim that such an anomaly doesn’t really serve as a potential falsifier – implying, further, that evolutionary theory can’t be falsified by known anomalies, as far as I can tell.** That such a system exists does nothing to prove or disprove anything (other than, perhaps, whether such a system can exist). The various theories of evolution do not state that such a system could not exist, so its presence certainly does not act as a falsifier for said theories. If a mechanism is found to produce such cases that is contrary to all known evolutionary mechanisms, then _that_ might act as a potential falsifier. But going around saying, “yeah…well explain _this_!” isn’t going to work. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/85 "2003-08-19T22:54:27Z")
**foolsguinea** , c’mon. You’ve been around here long enough to know that the Theory of Evolution does not address the issue of abiogenesis. Regardless how life arose, evolution describes how it works once it is up and moving. Speciation _does_ occur, regardless of how life arose, and Evolution addresses the mechanism for that event. There may be philosophical or theological issues with which one can wrestle over abiogenesis, but they do not have any bearing on the scientific examination of evolution. ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/86 "2003-08-19T23:08:39Z")
**tom~** : Having corrected a detail in one of your posts the last time this topic came up, I should assure you in advance this isn’t personal. This happens to be one of those areas where the oft-told versions of the tale obscure the more interesting and awkward reality. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by tomndebb \* > Darwin’s _prediction_ was that the land was _at least_ old enough to support his theory and Lord Kelvin’s claim was that Darwin was too short by a factor of 15. Darwin’s prediction was falsifiable and the setting of the age of the sun to be several orders of magnitude older than Lord Kelvin’s calculations, along with the discovery that Darwin’s _terminus ad quem_ was very conservative bolstered Darwin’s theory rather than harming it. I wouldn’t take this as a good example of Darwin making a nontrivial falsifiable prediction. For a start, it’s not obvious he ever made a specific prediction and, whatever it was, he actually publically retracted it. The whole basis for the argument was a passage discussing the erosion of the Weald in the original edition of the _Origin_ (it’s in [Chapter IX](http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin/texts/origin1859/origin09.html)). My reading of it is that it’s largely illustrative; he wants to familiarise a non-technical audience with the possible extent of geological time and uses this as an example of the sorts of timescales one can envisage. The numbers he came up with were large, but wouldn’t have _shocked_ many, perhaps even most, geologists in 1859. However, the argument is also pretty scrappy - and Darwin would never pretend to rigour in his use of maths. To this physicist, it’s a respectable back-of-an-envelope estimate; Kelvin’s more cynical phrase was “savours a good deal of that known among engineers as guess at the half and multiply by two”. But then the calculation isn’t a central plank of the “one long argument”. Darwin clearly realises that the longer the past, the more comfortable evolution and natural selection can become in the mind of a sceptical reader. Yet he never commited to any minimum timescale that would be _necessary_ to generate the observed biological diversity. Quite how fast or slow the process might run in absolute terms was something he realised he didn’t have a firm handle on. The specific point quickly became negotiable. One of the early reviews laid into this calculation and he conceded the point in public, though not in private. He dropped the passage from later editions and added a comment acknowledging the criticism. By the 6th edition (the last in his lifetime), the age of the Weald isn’t mentioned at all and the second half of the section is entirely devoted to arguments developed since 1859. It was actually Kelvin who tried to turn the age of the Weald into a falsifiable prediction. One that he was falsifying, of course. Darwin’s reaction to all this is surprisingly difficult to judge. He felt the physics beyond him, so his public comments tend to be polite acknowledgements. The most revealing private comment is in a letter to Hooker; physics had been wrong in the past, but: > [@](#): > > Nevertheless, all uniformitarians had better at once cry ‘peccavi’ - not but what I feel a conviction that the world will be found rather older than Thomson makes it, and far older than the reviewer [in this instance, P.G. Tait] makes it. I am glad I have faced and admitted the difficulty in the last [fifth] edition of the _Origin_. [Hooker surely knew Latin, but, courtesy of that century’s Afgan Wars, even uneducated Englishmen of the time might have known that ‘peccavi’ means ‘I have sinned’.] He thinks he’ll turn out to be right on the point, but he can’t address the specific argument. He turned out to be entirely correct. But to read the public debate here as Darwin making and defending a falsifiable prediction is misreading it. Since the above is OT with respect to Behe, I should perhaps say that I’ve read the book and found it deeply unimpressive. I suspect that the idea of trying to identify systems that you can’t evolve **to** and asking whether they exist in nature may be useful. To a Popperian, it’d certainly be a useful test of falsifiability. In this sense, **Mr. Svinlesha** ’s position is irrelevant in a discussion of _Darwin’s Black Box_; like Kelvin, Behe thinks that Darwinism is falsifiable and that he can do so. (Incidentally, even at his extremes when he thought that it was unfalsifiable and hence unscientific, it’s hardly obvious that Popper thought that natural selection was **wrong**.) But it’s not a terribly brilliant insight; hell, it even occured to me as a kid. The difference is that, even then, I sort of realised that it wasn’t enough to rule out evolving from below. You had to identify states/structures that couldn’t be reached from in **any** direction in some complicated state space. And Behe’s specific criterion falls badly short in this respect. Furthermore, the book weasily adopts bait-and-switch tactics again and again. He introduces IC in the context of his mousetrap example. But most of his examples are his Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson analogies. Which, frankly, seems to miss the joke. The machines aren’t complicated because all the parts are essential. Most of them are completely inessential. Sure, they formally meet his IR criterion. But the irony is that even the drawings were surely _designed_ by taking a simple mechanism and elaborating it into an entirely reducable, complicated chain. ---
**Author:** ![Darwins\_Finch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darwins_finch/32/20304_2.png) [@Darwins\_Finch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darwins_Finch)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/87 "2003-08-19T23:47:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by TVAA \* > \*\*Secondly, what do you actually mean by saying “God did it”? > > If you’re claiming that an entity that we would recognize as an intelligence designed and created the world, what characteristics would that entity have? How did it create the world? What are the supposed characteristics of its design? How can we determine whether this entity was or is intervening in any given event? \*\* Isn’t that the whole problem? ID posits that just such an entity is responsible for those things which we currently don’t have answers for, without answering the questions of when, or how, such an entity might have intervened, and how we might be able to detect such interventions. This is why I said it is unfalsfiable. So, now you have me confused: how is ID falsfiable? You said “[t]he same way you falsify a claim that anything was done by anyone”, but how does that actually come into play here? We are, essentially, dealing with a capricious entity whose characteristics are undefined, yet who is claimed to have messed with something, at some time, in order to get from “there” to us, and presumably to nudge along other complex biological structures and/or systems. If we don’t know the answers to the questions you have asked, how can such an entity be shown _not_ to have been involved? ---
**Author:** ![TVAA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c57346/32.png) [@TVAA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TVAA)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/88 "2003-08-19T23:55:09Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by foolsguinea \* > \*\*How does a _reproducing_ system of metabolism arise spontaneously? \*\* How does a fire begin? > [@](#): > > \*\*Where was the first cell wall? The first ADP-ATP cycle? And the big one: At what point does a bunch of ribonucleic acid start reshaping its surroundings? \*\* We don’t even know whether those things were necessary for the emergence of life – your point notwithstanding. Heck, we can’t even decide on a good definition of “life”. > [@](#): > > \*\*How do we have life on this planet, dependent on conditions on this planet, _when life does not appear spontaneously in those conditions?_ \*\* That one’s easy: it can’t arise now. The raw materials that we might reasonably presume to be necessary for emergent life would immediately be co-opted by existing life. Even if it somehow managed to emerge (in a wildly improbable series of events), it would quickly be out-competed by existing organisms and extinguished. > [@](#): > > **In some quarters, the biggest scientific objection to theistic design is its unfalsifiability; but a belief that atheism can answer everything—when it hasn’t yet—is also a supposition. It may be correct, but the data aren’t in.** But there is currently NO data indicating the existence of a deity-like being. It’s Ockham’s Razor in action – we do not multiply beings needlessly. How does presuming an “intelligence” make explaining things any easier? We’d then have to account for the existence of the designer – which is itself massively improbable. > [@](#): > > \*\*Behe, whatever his faults, has a point: There are things we do know that don’t make biogenesis or macro-evolution _easy._ \*\* No one ever claimed understanding biogenesis would be _easy_. And “macro-evolution” is a very poorly-defined concept. > [@](#): > > **There’s something at work that we don’t quite understand.** That’s true of virtually everything. Don’t overestimate the extent of human knowledge. > [@](#): > > \*\*And given (a) the apparently teleological function of nucleic acid, and (b) the very existence of our own consciousness; a man could be forgiven for thinking that there is a fundamental “mind” at work in the universe—or, loosely speaking, God. \*\* No, a man couldn’t be. “What a beautiful snowflake! And what are the chances of water molecules randomly forming into this precise shape? Clearly, a mind is responsible!” Although, in a sense, he’d be right – the universe is the mind of God, after all. ---
**Author:** ![PigArcher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/bcef8e/32.png) [@PigArcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PigArcher)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/89 "2003-08-19T23:56:29Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Darwin’s Finch \* > **Isn’t that the whole problem? ID posits that just such an entity is responsible for those things which we currently don’t have answers for, without answering the questions of when, or how, such an entity might have intervened, and how we might be able to detect such interventions. This is why I said it is unfalsfiable.** In other words, God is the answer to all questions, but questions about God are unanswerable. :rolleyes: Sounds like a cop-out to me. ---
**Author:** ![vanilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f19dbf/32.png) [@vanilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vanilla)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/90 "2003-08-19T23:59:28Z")
I didn’t want to start a new thread, so I was wondering if any smart person could give me some answers to fundies objections to evolution that I’ve heard such as 1. Why are there still apes? 2. How come the earth doesn’t seem old enough for evoltion to have happened? 3. How did 2 mates of opposite sexes (especially humanoids) come into being at exactly the same time to mate successfully. Hope i haven’t hi-jacked this too much. thank you. ---
**Author:** ![TVAA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c57346/32.png) [@TVAA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TVAA)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/91 "2003-08-20T00:09:35Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Darwin’s Finch \* > \*\*Isn’t that the whole problem? ID posits that just such an entity is responsible for those things which we currently don’t have answers for, without answering the questions of when, or how, such an entity might have intervened, and how we might be able to detect such interventions. This is why I said it is unfalsfiable. \*\* But it also explains nothing. All that form of ID is involves sweeping the problems under the rug. Can’t explain it? Invoke the God-of-the-Gaps! The way to falsify this is to extend knowledge. Shrink the gaps, and the god shrinks with them. > [@](#): > > \*\*So, now you have me confused: how is ID falsfiable? You said “[t]he same way you falsify a claim that anything was done by anyone”, but how does that actually come into play here? We are, essentially, dealing with a capricious entity whose characteristics are undefined, yet who is claimed to have messed with something, at some time, in order to get from “there” to us, and presumably to nudge along other complex biological structures and/or systems. If we don’t know the answers to the questions you have asked, how can such an entity be shown _not_ to have been involved? \*\* The claim itself is easily falsified: if there’s no justification for the claim, it’s wrong even if the point made in the claim is correct. For any meaningful explanation of the intervention, we can falsify it the same way we falsify everything else. For example: “I had toast for yesterday’s breakfast.” You _personally_ have no way to prove or disprove that statement, yet we all recognize that there’s nothing fundamentally beyond the possibility of knowledge. We don’t know what the simplest form of “life” is, as we can’t even decide what we mean by “life”. We have no way of detemining how many other ways life might have arisen – even restricting ourselves to the current shared biochemistry of Earth life, we don’t know how much of that biochemistry is truly necessary. We don’t know how life has adapted to itself – once living creatures have a feature, they tend to develop other features that are dependent on it. Is a cellular membrane necessary for life, or is it just that once life developed processes that required the existence of the cellular membrane, any change that removed it proved lethal? Did life begin at ultra-high temperatures and adapt to cooler, or vice versa? We don’t know. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/92 "2003-08-20T00:15:35Z")
I felt an ass after my post. I just impulsively felt like tweaking Diogenes, then I read all this much more erudite stuff in between—but Tom~ made it all worth it! > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by tomndebb \* > **foolsguinea, c’mon. You’ve been around here long enough to know that the Theory of Evolution does not address the issue of abiogenesis…** :rolleyes: Then it’s a “a question you think evolutionary science can’t answer,” which is what Diogenes asked for. Trying to separate biogenesis from the whole freakin’ rest of biology is a cop-out equivalent to “Well, we don’t know where God came from.” It’s a cheat. Like “overlapping magisteria” is a cheat. Not as intellectually honest, but still a cheat. Or do you now believe in a God who only creates _Monera_? ---
**Author:** ![TVAA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c57346/32.png) [@TVAA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TVAA)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/93 "2003-08-20T00:15:52Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by vanilla \* > \*\*I didn’t want to start a new thread, so I was wondering if any smart person could give me some answers to fundies objections to evolution that I’ve heard such as > > 1. Why are there still apes? > 2. How come the earth doesn’t seem old enough for evoltion to have happened? > 3. How did 2 mates of opposite sexes (especially humanoids) come into being at exactly the same time to mate successfully. > > Hope i haven’t hi-jacked this too much. > thank you. \*\* 1. Why shouldn’t there be? The question itself is flawed – it takes for granted the incorrect idea that evolution produces “superior” creatures that then replace the “inferior” beings that came earlier. It also ignores the known fact that humans didn’t evolve from apes; we evolved alongside them from a common ancestor. 1. This is a stupid question. How long does evolution take? To produce what, exactly? Now, there _is_ an intelligent version of this question: Since life seems to have existed as soon as it was physically possible for it do so (in terms of the Earth’s temperature, availability of water, etc.), how could life have evolved so quickly? The answer: we really don’t know how long it would take for life to develop out of lifeless chemicals (presuming it can, which seems reasonable). There’s a very real possibility that life originated elsewhere (perhaps Mars, which was originally quite similar to Earth and “developed” sooner but quickly became incompatible with most known forms of life). 1. This is another stupid question. Species don’t just fall out of the sky, nor do they suddenly arise as distinct and different from previous species. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/94 "2003-08-20T00:20:36Z")
As for TVAA, you actually gave good answers. (And I already knew some of them.) But where you & I differ is this: I see teleology in the world. It’s a philosophical difference. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/95 "2003-08-20T00:28:13Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Mr. Svinlesha \* > \*\* > > **Voyager** :Really? What prediction was that, exactly? \*\* The position of Mercury. If you recall, the measurement of the position of Mercury during the eclipse of 19whatever, which showed that it’s apparent position was as Einstein predicted, and not as predicted by Newtonian theory, showed that the path of light was bent by the gravity of the sun. This is what made Einstein and relativity “household words.” I’m sure that there were some scientists who still rejected relativity after this, but science sometimes moves on by the old guard dying unconverted. If someone could define an equally convincing experiment against evolution, and it succeeded, a Nobel would surely follow (and I know Einstein did not get his prize for relativity.) Actually experiments testing evolution are done every time a fossil is unearthed and in a sense everytime a baby anything is born, and it always seems to pass. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/96 "2003-08-20T00:32:26Z")
> [@](#): > > Then it’s a “a question you think evolutionary science can’t answer,” which is what Diogenes asked for. Well, from that perspective, you should have just asked who was going to win the NL pennant, this year, or “How far, in A.U.s, is the Crab Nebula?”. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![TVAA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c57346/32.png) [@TVAA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TVAA)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/97 "2003-08-20T00:32:35Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by foolsguinea \* > \*\*Then it’s a “a question you think evolutionary science can’t answer,” which is what Diogenes asked for. Trying to separate biogenesis from the whole freakin’ rest of biology is a cop-out equivalent to “Well, we don’t know where God came from.” \*\* The problem is that the question falls right on the boundary between chemistry and biology. The more basic and elemental form of evolutionary theory does indeed deal with the origins of life, in the same sense that it explains why sand grains in old deserts are spherical and why evaporative cooling occurs. The short answer: we don’t know enough about the earliest forms of life, the conditions on the Earth at the time of the first life, the possibility that life arose elsewhere under conditions we have even less of an understanding of than of the early Earth, etc., to make educated guesses. We don’t know. However, to conclude that God (or some deity-like thing) was responsible is utterly unjustified. Skepticism cuts both ways – we can’t produce evidence that biogenesis does not require intelligent activation, but neither can we show that it requires intelligent activation. Without evidence, we can only withhold judgment. ---
**Author:** ![TVAA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c57346/32.png) [@TVAA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TVAA)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/98 "2003-08-20T00:37:52Z")
**Voyager** : Are you certain you’re not confusing two different experiments? I recall one experiment (during an eclipse) that demonstrated the shift of the apparent position of stars near the Sun was consistent with Relativity and not Newtonian mechanics (which predicted a lesser shift). There was another “proof” that involved the orbit of Mercury. Its orbit deviates slightly from what Newton’s equations predict – but the Einsteinian model gives different results that match the observed orbit. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/99 "2003-08-20T00:37:53Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by foolsguinea \* > \*\*I felt an ass after my post. I just impulsively felt like tweaking Diogenes, then I read all this much more erudite stuff in between—but Tom~ made it all worth it!:rolleyes: Then it’s a “a question you think evolutionary science can’t answer,” which is what Diogenes asked for. Trying to separate biogenesis from the whole freakin’ rest of biology is a cop-out equivalent to “Well, we don’t know where God came from.” > > It’s a cheat. Like “overlapping magisteria” is a cheat. Not as intellectually honest, but still a cheat. > > Or do you now believe in a God who only creates _Monera_? \*\* Abiogenesis is irrelevant to evolution. Note, I said _evolution_, not _biology_. The origin of life is no more germane to evolutionary theory than the big bang is to studying the orbital patterns of planets. Evolutionary science is not _supposed_ to answer abiogenesis, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasonable theories about the origin of life. Abiogenesis is not some kind of inpenetrable mystery, and no one is trying to separate it from biology. Now, can you give an example of a tough question for evolutionary theory that actually relates to _evolution_? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059/100 "2003-08-20T00:52:28Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RaftPeople \* > \*\* > > Voyager: > I like your argument. ID implies complex structures existed from the beginning. > Although one could argue, our DNA contained the capability to produce these complex structures from the beginning but some mechanism prevented their expression until the appropriate time. > \*\* DNA itself is just a molecule. The detailed structure of DNA (plus all the other stuff involving expression we’re discovering) produces the complex structures. So, in a sense, once DNA started there was the capability of expressing these structures - all that was needed was to wander through design space until we came to them. Wandering through design space is what evolution is all about. This is not to imply that there is a goal to this wandering. Here’s another analogy, I just came up with. Say you’re playing an exploratory video game, set in some sort of castle with all sorts of twisty passages (all different 🙂 ) You have lots of lives. You start at the front entrance. One time you play, you wander into a nearby room, where there is some sort of game, and you stay there happy, probably getting better at the game. That is kind of like one celled creatures. In another game you wander further, take a left turn, and fall into a pit and die. You’ve had an unfavorable mutation, and die. Another round you go a long way, and arrive at a really cool room. Ah, you say, the goal of this game was to get to this room. However you don’t know that there are lots of equally cool rooms reachable by other paths, and if you had reached them you’d be just as convinced that you had found the purpose of the game. Maybe not as good as Dennett’s Mendelian library, but perhaps more accessible. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-book-darwins-black-box-by-michael-j-behe-the-end-of-evolution/196059.md?page=6)