Sorry cato: forgot

Dr Behe is a curious dude. He’s a biochemist, a practicing Catholic and a leading “light” of the IDT crew. He wrote a book (“darwin’s black box”) wherein he proposed that cellular and physiological mechanisms were often “irreducibly complex” machines. By this he meant that all components of the machine have to be present before the machine will work. A mousetrap is a famous example. He developed the argument that if evolution assembles a biological machine by happenstance and piecemeal, then these machines cannot come about by evolution, because the pieces individually have no function. If they have no function unless all of them are present at the same time, and in the appropriate orientations, then Behe reasoned that the liklihood of all of the parts just happening to come together was remote, and was thus evidence of design.
The argument has been shredded, both fairly and unfairly, for many reasons. Firstly, Behe’s scholarship was poor: some of the systems he said were irreducibly complex (ie blood clotting) are demonstrably not when one examines their comparative phylogeny. He talked of “the” bacterial flagellum, when in point of factthere are (ahem) quite a variety of bacterial flagellae. Secondly, he is not clear on what exactly a part of a biological machine is. This vagueness s actually unforgiveable, in my opinion. Thirdly, a machine may be irreducibly complex if used for one purpose, but its parts may have been used for different purposes in its evolutionary history, and co-opted to form a rudimentary machine, which can then be refined. Fourthly, some biological systems (ie steroid synthesis) that appear to need everything in place before they can work can be shown to have reasonable functional precursors that use alternate paths to help them along. Fifthly, saying that you do not kbnow how something evolved does not make design necessarily more ikely. It may simply mean that you don’t know. And so on, and on and on. The point is, that from the point of view of biochemistry and cell biology, the idea that irreducible complexity=unevolvability=design is nonsense, because 1. irreducible complexity is itself not well defined and 2. unevolvability is essentially the proving of a negative and 3. you have to demonstrate that design itself is a plausible mechanism without the idea of unevolveability.

Now, Behe has been involved wth the discovery insitute (which has some very sneaky and crazy people as its “fellows” ) for a loooong time, and helped write “of Pandas and People”, a creationist work that was morphed into an ID text simply by changing “creationism” to “intelligent design theory” everywhere in the text (no fooling. its true.) For this reason, he is called a creationist. However, in his most recent book, Behe says flatly that he endorse universal common descent, and his view of IDT is simply about the mechanism of evolution. Behe in person seems harmless enough: a bit dim, and intellectually dishonest, but not a pathological liar. He’s aid that he hews to his Church’s stance on evolution. I think it is reasonable to take him at his word on this, but others, because of his associations and past, insist that her MUST BE a creatiobnist, and creationism and ID are the same thing.

I think this is a mistake. If ID cannot be critiqued on its own ground, as science, and as poor crackpot science at that, then evolutionary biology has serious, serious problems. Caling ID “creationism” is simply an extended ad hominem attack: it may be true, but it has no bearing on the bedrock issue, which in this arena should ultimately be the scientific validity of the ideas.