The Observer, March 2, 2007
Volume XXXIX, Issue 19
ID speaker presents unsupported beliefs
This past Monday, Michael Behe, one of the most high profile proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) in the country, spoke at Case in defense of the theory. Strosacker was packed with students, faculty, and fans of Behe from across Ohio.
ID is framed as an explicitly scientific theory. Behe summarized the argument for ID in 5 points: first, "design is not mystical. It is deduced from physical structure;" second, "everyone agrees that things in biology appear to be designed;" third, "there are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution;" fourth, "The grand claims of Darwinism are uncontrolled imagination;" and finally, there is "strong evidence for design and little evidence for Darwinism."
The third point is the intellectual core of the ID argument. "Structural obstacles" refers to the idea of irreducible complexity. A system is said to be irreducibly complex if it fails to function after one of its parts is removed. The assumption is that there are no useful intermediates (which of course contradict numerous examples throughout nature of primitive, imperfect organ systems that still confer selective advantage).
Hillel Chiel, a professor in the department of biology pointed out in his response to Behe that irreducible complexity is in fact predicted by evolution, and that the removal of a crucial component after it becomes critical is not relevant to the evolution of a system via slight, successive modifications.
Behe cites the bacterial flagellar motor as irreducibly complex. He pointed to the fact that it was complex and declared that it was irreducibly so. As biochemist Ken Miller from Brown University notes, the type III secretory system, homologous to the base of the motor, has been well characterized in a number of publications (for a complete list, go to http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html) as having full function independent of the other components of the motor.
Behe's argument for the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade was similarly lacking. He correctly pointed out that reputed scientist Russell Doolittle had misinterpreted the content of one paper cited as evidence that the cascade is not irreducibly complex. Yet Behe failed to address the core content of Doolittle's argument, which was a heavily supported description of how gene duplication and exon shuffling account for the evolution of this system (http://bostonreview.net/BR22.1/doolittle.html). The typo alone was used as evidence that "nobody on earth knows how [the blood clotting cascade] came to be."
Evolution was described as "just a theory" with "little evidence." This "theory," as Patricia Princehouse (who teaches evolutionary theory at Case) points out, is so well supported by mutually-buttressed evidence in all major areas of biology (fossil record, molecular genetics, the geographic distribution of species, developmental homology, etc) that it ranks as one of the great theories in science.
In the past, religion has dealt with conflicting scientific progress in different ways, including censorship, re-interpreting religious texts, etc. ID is unique in that it is a direct attempt to subvert the science itself to suppress conflict with creationism. It represents a misappropriation of the credibility that science has earned by sticking to its naturalistic foundation to attack this same foundation. Chiel keenly noted that a more fruitful approach would be to recognize that science and religion address different domains of human inquiry, and to draw the boundaries between the two accordingly.
The posters advertising Behe's presentation asked us to think. But the content of Behe's defense of ID suggests that it is not about thinking at all. It's about a fear of thinking, about a desperate desire for gaps in knowledge as a place for God. Behe's approach betrays a desire for ignorance. The scientific approach involves work, experimenting, surviving peer review, and cumulative intellectual progress.
For those interested in understanding evolution and the complexity of life, I recommend Finding Darwin's God by Ken Miller and Origin of Species (Ch. 6), in which Darwin defeated all creationist arguments used against his theory to date.
