Is This the Best They Can Do?

On Thursday night I went to a talk at UMass given by Michael Behe.  He’s one of the leading proponents of “Intelligent Design” theory as an alternative to Darwinian evolution, and was a star witness at the Dover school board trial.  Behe laid out his argument for Intelligent Design, and in a congenial and folksy way explained that he had simply ‘followed the evidence’ to reach his conclusions. But at no point in his talk did he show us any clear scientific evidence to support his ideas.

Here, in a nutshell, is his argument.
1. Organisms contain complex parts that perform specific functions.
2. Many of these parts appear designed.
3. Some structures are too complex to have arisen by natural selection.
4. Darwinian claims rest on imagination.
5. Therefore, there is strong evidence for design and little evidence for Darwinism.

Superficially, this looks like a logical argument. It certainly follows the pattern of premise, argument, and conclusion that make up a logical argument. But it’s rife with fallacy. What’s worse, Behe claimed he was making a scientific argument. Scientific arguments can be tested, have the potential of being falsified, and make predictions about the real world. Behe’s argument can’t be tested and has no predictive ability. So whatever it is, it isn’t science.

Let me show you what I mean. Behe starts with two statements of fact as his premise. Living organisms are fantastically complex things. They’re filled with structures that are intricately put together (organisms also have some pretty kludgy structures, but let’s leave that point alone for the moment).

With the audience feeling good about these facts, he moves on to his first real argument. Behe says some biological structures, particularly at the molecular level, are irreducibly complex. That is, if you take any of their bits away, they don’t work anymore. Natural selection works gradually, so there’s no way this complicated structure could have evolved. Some intelligent designer must have put these structures together.

As a theological argument, it’s fairly attractive. (It was equally attractive when William Paley first suggested it back in 1802.) But if it’s going to be a scientific argument, you need to be able to test it. And the problem is, Behe doesn’t actually give us a way to detect design in biological systems beyond ‘you’ll know it when you see it.’ Instead, he’s tries to falsify natural selection by saying that if you can’t personally explain RIGHT NOW how it produced a particular structure, it must be false, leaving only a supernatural Designer to pick up the slack.

And unfortunately for Behe, his basic premise is false. Biologists have been poking at the cellular machinery Behe claims is “irreducibly complex,” and finding that it’s quite reducible. Some parts of the bacterial flagellum, for example, seem to be related to a perfectly functional cellular secretory system. And one way natural selection works is to co-opt existing structures for new functions.

So there’s a honking big incorrect premise sitting smack dab in the middle of this argument which on its own would turn the whole thing into a logical fallacy. But Behe took the opportunity to toss in the big juicy ad hominem argument that biologists are just making up these stories anyway.

That made me mad.

His evidence, such as it was, was that a whole bunch of prominent scientists freely admit that they don’t know how these complex structures evolved. In the sciences, careers are made by studying unknown things. Behe was claiming that these scientists were saying “We’ll NEVER know” when they were really saying “We don’t know YET.”

So after one incorrect premise and a logical fallacy, we came to Behe’s conclusion: lots of evidence for design and little for natural selection. He went so far as to call Darwinian claims “urban legends.”

Just for giggles, let’s look at Darwin’s argument for natural selection.
1. Organisms have traits that vary among individuals.
2. Individuals pass on their traits to their offspring.
3. More offspring are produced in a given generation than will survive to reproduce.
4. The individuals that reproduce are not picked randomly. They will be individuals with traits  that improve survival and reproduction in their environment.

Not only is this a stronger logical argument (Darwin had an Anglican classical education, after all), but each part of the argument has been rigorously tested over the past century. An excellent introduction to the vast amount of data supporting natural selection is at the University of California Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. So much for urban legends.

Comments

[Thom H.]

Great review and analysis. Behe has been refuted so many times it is difficult to understand how he can continue to spout his ID drivel. I guess the problem is that it takes a lot more education to understand why he is wrong than it does to think that he is right.