Posted by Bob Murphy, an economist, has an article at the thoroughly loathsome LewRockwell.com (please don’t try and tell me the people who write for that site are libertarians; that collection of southern nationalists and whackos is anything but libertarian) about what he terms “typical objections to intelligent design.” Much like Orson Scott Card’s article, however, this one relies upon the old tactic of beating up straw men. Rather than engaging the strongest objections to ID he only engages the easy ones, the clumsy attacks on the character of ID advocates rather than the serious and substantive criticism of the validity of ID itself. Let’s take a look at them one at a time.
Time and again, neo-Darwinists (the somewhat poor term I shall use to describe the defenders of the orthodox view) have accused Michael Behe and other IDers as completely ignorant and/or deceptive. Obviously I can’t speak for the entire movement – there are liars associated with every group of people – but from my limited investigations I don’t get the sense that Behe is either.
He goes on to quote Behe himself saying that, given his education and training in the subject and the fact that he has consistently received major grants for research in biochemistry, he probably deserves the benefit of the doubt on accusations that he is ignorant about biochemistry. I fully agree with Behe and Murphy here. I don’t think Behe is ignorant. At the very least, he knows infinitely more about biochemistry than I will ever know. But frankly, I think this is a straw man. If someone merely pronounced Behe ignorant in any general sense about biochemistry, they are hardly worth taking seriously in the first place. You’re likely dealing with some message board or chatroom loudmouth taking his ego for a walk rather than a serious argument by someone who knows what they’re talking about. I’ve been involved in this issue for years and I know nearly all of the major critics of ID in one capacity or another and I know not a single one who would make that general statement about Behe.
But there are perhaps some related charges that are not so lacking in credibility. The fact that Behe is well educated in biochemistry and deservedly credentialed does not make his arguments correct, nor does it insulate him from the sort of confirmation bias that haunts all sorts of people in similar situations, perhaps even most of us at one point or another. It is a reasonable argument, I think, to point out that Behe dismisses out of ignorance most of the scientific literature concerning the evolution of the systems he claims are irreducibly complex – and when I say “out of ignorance” I mean “without bothering to read them in the first place.” At the Dover trial, upon being shown dozens of books and articles concerning the evolutionary development of the three primary systems he says could not have evolved – the flagellum, the immune system and the blood clotting cascade – he admited that he had not read most of them but that he was still certain that they would not contain any reasonable explanation of how those systems developed. This is an argument from ignorance in the most literal sense and pointing that out does not mean that one is calling Behe ignorant in a general sense. Murphy does attempt to deal with the question of whether ID is an argument from ignorance in the logical fallacy sense:
Admittedly, at times it seems as if the ID people are merely saying, “I can’t imagine how a cocker spaniel could’ve evolved from a prokaryote, so it must be impossible.” To this (straw man) objection, neo-Darwinists have glib retorts such as, “Your ignorance isn’t a strike against my theory.”
But let’s change the discussion to any field other than biology, and see how puny this defense now sounds. Mathematician A offers a conjecture, and Mathematician B says, “I don’t see how you can get that result.” Mathematician A responds, “Your lack of imagination isn’t a strike against my theorem.”
This is, of course, a terrible analogy. Mathematical formulas follow a rigid type of proof – a literal proof, not in the same sense that an emprical explanation is “proven” by examining the evidence. If you can’t demonstrate the precise formula by which you came to a conclusion in math, you haven’t done anything at all. Explanations for empirical phenomena don’t work that way, indeed can’t work that way. Here again I think Murphy is phrasing the “typical objection” in the weakest possible manner so it is easy to defeat (indeed, easy enough to defeat that he thinks it is defeated by his obviously simplistic and weak analogy). Let me offer a much stronger version of the argument from ignorance objection to ID:
When Behe points to, say, the blood clotting cascade as an example of a complex biochemical system that cannot have developed through a step by step evolutionary process, we have to evaluate this argument not only on its premises (that the system is indeed irreducibly complex and that there is no good evolutionary explanation for how it could have developed) but on whether the conclusion he draws (that therefore it must have been designed) is logical as well. In each case of the three systems he holds up as examples, nature itself tells us that those systems are in fact not irreducibly complex – that is, we have examples of animals in nature with less complex versions of those systems (systems that do not have all of the components that are present in the most highly developed examples in the animal world) that are still entirely functional. Not perfectly functional, perhaps, but they get the job done, certainly well enough to confer a survival advantage on the organism that contains them. The textbook example of this is the blood clotting system of dolphins, which lacks one of the key factors (factor XII) that Behe says is absolutely necessary for the system to function (remember the standard he sets up for an IC system – remove a single component of the system and the system fails to function completely).
Evaluating the second premise of Behe’s argument is equally important. If a system is irreducibly complex, that is, if it has multiple interacting parts that are all required for the system to function, is it really necessary to conclude that the system could not have developed through an evolutionary process? I don’t think so and here’s why: because there are lots of biochemical systems that meet his definition of being IC that Behe himself accepts as having evolved naturally without any need for intervention. He has said several times, for example, that he accepts the conventional explanations for the evolution of the hemoglobin system, an explanation involving the well understood mechanisms of gene duplication and cooption of superfluous duplicate copies resulting in what is now a complex interacting biochemical system that works together to distribute oxygen through the bloodstream. But this leads us to two reasons why the IC argument is, in essence, an argument from ignorance.
First, because there was a time not so long ago when the evolutionary development of hemoglobin was not so well understood. The ability to sequence genomes and make chromosome to chromosome comparisons is relatively new. Had Behe written his book 20 years ago, he might well have pointed to hemoglobin as an example of irreducible complexity and pointed out how the cooperative oxygen-binding capacity of 4 different chains interacting could not have evolved by chance. But with new research capabilities come new explanations, as science shows us every day. 20 years ago, Behe might well have said that our ignorance of how such a complex biochemical system could have developed step by step is evidence that it must have been designed. And that is why we often describe his argument as a “science stopper” – had we stopped at the point of ignorance as evidence for impossibility at any point in the past, we would have explained nothing.
Second, the fact that there are systems that fit his definition of an IC system but that he nonetheless accepts evolutionary explanations for suggests that it’s not really the IC nature of the system that leads him to his conclusion but the fact that we don’t yet have a well understood account of their development. That is, it suggests that IC is not really an objective measure of the nature of the biochemical system at all. If that’s true, then all we are really left with is the argument from ignorance that Murphy refers to – “if we don’t understand how this happened, it must have been designed”. But again, had we stopped at that point in this or any other field of science at almost any point in the past, we would have given up before finding productive explanations for virtually every complex phenomenon under the sun.
Another typical objection is that the IDers have no peer-reviewed research. The IDers come back and say that they do, and then the critics say that stuff doesn’t count, etc. etc. I think this argument is silly for two main reasons. First, it basically reduces to: “The mainstream scientists overwhelmingly reject ID.” Everybody already knows this, including the ID people. So it’s not really a separate argument to add, “And no journals publish your stuff, either.”
Second, ID is in its infancy as far as scientific theories go. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that these people were right, and biology has been barking up the wrong evolutionary tree for 150 years. Isn’t this exactly what you’d expect to see, then? No journals publishing the work of Behe, Dembski, et al., so that these guys have to write up their views in books?
Again, I think he is offering up the simplest possible version of this objection to ID. And again, let me offer up a far more credible version of it. The problem is not that there is no peer-reviewed articles by ID advocates. Indeed, that was always a weak objection and bound to be proven wrong. There are a thousand obscure scientific journals in the world. It was inevitable that they were going to get an article in a refereed journal at some point, either through a like-minded colleague on the inside (Richard Sternberg, please pick up the white courtesy phone) or someone who genuinely thought the article raised interesting questions. In fact, there are several facets to this that contribute to a much stronger version of this argument.
First, bear in mind that the ID movement promised that the first step in their strategy was going to be “scientific research and publication”. The Wedge document lists this as phase one. Indeed, the document declares that this is “the essential component of everything that comes afterward” and notes that, “Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade.” But here we are 10 years later and, as Behe admitted in the Dover trial, there is not a single piece of research published that confirms or supports ID. More importantly, no one has yet proposed any research that in principle could confirm ID because there is no positive theory of ID from which one might derive testable hypotheses, there are only a set of criticisms of evolution. That’s why Minnich admitted during the Dover trial that any test of irreducible complexity is really just a test of evolution, not a test of ID (which again goes back to the argument from ignorance objection – ID relies upon the failure of evolution in order to make an argument because it makes no novel predictions of its own).
Second, ID advocates have tried to make up for this lack of research by pointing to articles that don’t support ID and falsely claiming that they do. They’ve offered lists of peer-reviewed research and claimed that it supports ID when, upon examination, it clearly does not. For example, Dembski has often pointed to Douglas Axe’s experiments on perturbation as proof that “any slight modification” of the amino acid sequence in the protein in the experiment would “destroy the system’s existing function” and even “the possibility of any function of the system whatsoever.” But in fact, Axe’s research said no such thing. Axe’s paper actually found that you could make groups of 10 changes at a time in the amino acid sequences without significantly changing the function of the protein, you could make up to 30 changes at a time while retaining slight function of the protein, you had to make 40 changes at a time in order to destroy function entirely.
Another great example of this is the Behe and Snoke (2004) paper. The DI listed it as an example of genuine peer reviewed research that supports ID. William Dembski has declared that Behe and Snoke’s research “may well be the nail in the coffin [and] the crumbling of the Berlin wall of Darwinian evolution.” But under cross examination in the Dover trial, we found out that quite the opposite was true. Under oath, Behe admitted that their computer simulation had in fact shown that complex biochemical systems requiring multiple interacting parts for the system to function and that required multiple, consecutive and unpreserved mutations to be fixed in a population could evolve within 20,000 years even if the parameters of the simulation were rigged to make that outcome as unlikely as possible. So in fact, the argument about peer reviewed research goes far beyond the simple question of whether they get an article or two published in a journal.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT SCIENTIFIC
Beyond being merely wrong, ID allegedly fails to qualify even as a scientific theory at all. Science invokes only natural causes to explain things in the natural world, and hence (the objection runs) ID is unscientific when it invokes an unseen “designer” to explain, say, the irreducible complexity of the human nervous system.
William Dembski has dealt this objection a decisive blow when he explains the potential for ID in bioterrorism forensics. At some point in the not too distant future, we will probably see outbreaks of genetically engineered viruses or bacteria. After a given outbreak, people will need to be able to determine whether the deaths were due to natural causes, or were instead homicides. Now whom should we ask to perform this task for us? Priests? Philosophers? Or scientists? And if you agree that it should be the scientists who figure it out, how should they proceed? Wouldn’t they, oh I don’t know, take samples of the viruses and see if they could’ve been produced by Darwinian processes, and then (if not) report to the government that we’ve got some terrorists out there designing killer microbes?
There are several problems with this answer. First of all, it relies on the same old analogy between human intervention and divine or supernatural intervention. Even if Dembski was right about this (and I doubt he is), it would tell us nothing about how to detect the actions of a supernatural designer, and that is exactly what Dembski himself admits is required by ID when he says, “it is a transcendent design, not reducible to the physical world. Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life.” Second, I would argue that it is much more likely that the government will make its argument for a human source of such bioterrorism by reference to outside information – the disappearance of samples from a government lab, the ability to pinpoint where the agent was introduced into the water supply or wherever it was released, informants that tell us what happened, or any number of other things.
Moreover, this is still an argument from ignorance. Even if it was shown that a given bacterium was genetically engineered, that would not in any way indicate that evolution could not have produced the genetic diversity we see around us, or even that it could not have produced that particular trait that was engineered under the right circumstances. And regardless, the ability to detect human intervention, where we understand the tools that would be used and therefore may be able to trace their use in a particular situation, does nothing to help us detect the design work of a supernatural agent with the unconstrained ability to create anything ex nihilo.
A very popular (and ad hominem) attack is that ID proponents don’t really just believe in ID; they’re actually Bible-thumping Christians who pretend they don’t know anything about the designer in order to keep the classroom textbooks legal. I agree that the vast majority of ID proponents probably fit this description. However, one notable exception is philosopher Antony Flew. When Flew renounced his atheism because of the evidence of design, I recall prominent atheists reassuring their followers that Flew wasn’t a Christian, and that all he meant was that life didn’t arise purely by accident. So apparently (as even the atheists in this case point out with relief) one can be convinced by the empirical evidence that life exhibits design, without endorsing the God of the Bible.
It really is getting tiresome to hear people invoke Antony Flew over and over again without including his retraction of his statement. When he initially declared that he had become convinced of the need for a “first cause” kind of creator, he spelled out the “one and only reason” for that conclusion – “the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.” But after being shown the actual research being done on that question and the promise that it holds, he wrote to Richard Carrier, “I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.”
Mr. Murphy, like Orson Scott Card, relies upon, if not actual straw men, at least straw versions of much stronger arguments in order to declare victory. But I think it’s clear that if one takes these arguments in their strongest version, they are far more compelling and difficult to answer than either of them are willing to admit.
January 25, 2006
January 26, 2006
I.e. above you were telling me that even if something were IC, it still could’ve evolved, and then to demonstrate how I must have missed this elementary point, you quote me saying that even if something were IC, it still could’ve evolved!