How Technological Innovations in Information Transfer Have Made Literature Bluffing Obsolete
| August 8, 2006 | Posted by GilDodgen under Intelligent Design |
In the Old West, in the days of the Pony Express, information could not be transferred more rapidly than a horse could gallop. Then came the telegraph. Bank robbers could no longer escape to nearby towns without the residents having been informed in advance, at the speed of light in Morse Code.
Then came wireless communication. It was no longer necessary to lay out telegraph or telephone lines. Information could be transferred at the speed of light to Neil Armstrong on the moon.
Then came the blogosphere. At the speed of a URL click, one can check up on references. Literature bluffing is no longer a viable tactic in a debate. Bluffers can no longer escape to a nearby town without being intercepted before they get there.
Michael Behe was instrumental in making the Darwinian literature-bluffing tactic public.
Behe was assured by those in his field that the biochemical evolutionary literature was replete with detailed explanations of how his proposed irreducibly complex biochemical systems could be accounted for in Darwinian terms. But when he checked the literature he discovered that not only were there no detailed explanations, there were not even any speculations. The question had essentially never been addressed by the scientific community in his discipline. The Darwinian thesis had been assumed from the outset, never questioned, and never rigorously investigated. In fact, it had not been investigated at all.
Judge Jones fell prey to literature bluffing. (Actually, he fell prey to indirect hearsay literature bluffing.) Jones apparently believes that Behe’s irreducible-complexity challenge to Darwinian mechanisms has been refuted by the “scientific” community, when in fact those “refutations” amount to nothing more than storytelling based on nonexistent evidence and demonstrably faulty reasoning. Check out my UD essay on that subject here.
41 Responses to How Technological Innovations in Information Transfer Have Made Literature Bluffing Obsolete
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Thank you for visiting Andrea. (I presume you’re the Andrea from Pandas Thumb)
Behe may not have known the stack in front of him was the same as the bibliography.
Salvador
I don’t know about the particular papers that Behe was shown, but most of the recent papers I’ve read about the evolution of the immune system DO NOT even attempt to answer Behe’s questions. They are more of a study of comparative biochemical anatomy than a stepwise explanation of the system’s development. They usually have titles like V(D)J Recombination and the Evolution of the Adaptive Immune System. They are usually not very far from biochemical fairy tales:
It’s just comparative anatomy plus a nice bedtime story to help prop up the materialist mythology.
Andrea –
Excellent link. I think it underscores Behe’s point nicely. Evolutionists seem to not understand what Behe’s challenge was, and that is why they think that this literature supports their case against him. But as I said earlier, Behe was looking for an actual, step-by-step biochemical evolutionary pathway, while the papers all are just exercises in comparative anatomy and bedtime stories.
Jon
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but it seems to me that if a concise summary were requested of the main evidence/arguments that the 58 pieces of literature were supposed to have provided against the IC of the immune system, then an intelligent rebuttal could have been made by Behe. Would this have been too much to ask in a judicial case like this?
Willm,
I thought something along those lines when I first read the transcript.
I wished that Behe had said “these prove the evolution by RM and NS of the immune section? Well, let’s read them together and find those proofs and assess them” or “please read to me the relevant demonstrations from these papers that I might render an opinion”.
Failing that, I thought his responses were excellent as they were.
Comment #23
This he said in another context, but had also discussed it in the trial (I just don’t want to go back and find it right now):
Given the obvious theatrics of the stacks of papers, the fact that Behe managed the questions very well, the fact that he had yet to be questioned under re-direct, and the points Barry Allen makes in his “Denfense of the defendants…” thread, I can fully understand why Behe and his lawyers thought this was a non-issue.
Quite the surprise Jones laid on them in his findings, I’d bet.
I recall my take on the pile of papers issue at the time was something like: if any of these books really proved anything like you’re claiming they do, they would be so fantastically famous that they’d be referenced in every evolution book, and referred to by Eugenia Scott and company daily. Just look how much mileage they try to make of the Stanley Miller experiments, that prove virtually nothing.
“Excellent link. I think it underscores Behe’s point nicely. Evolutionists seem to not understand what Behe’s challenge was, and that is why they think that this literature supports their case against him. But as I said earlier, Behe was looking for an actual, step-by-step biochemical evolutionary pathway…”
Actually, Behe’s original argument was that IC was a “formidable challenge to evolutionary theory” (or something like that) because it was intrinsically qualitatively different from the conventional hurdles evolutionary mechanisms encounter. Indeed, Behe candidly and honestly agreed – and as far as I know, he still does – that the evolution of most non-IC (or “lesser” IC) biochemical structures, including fairly complex ones like tetrameric hemoglobin, is entirely plausible, even in the absence of infinitely detailed step-by-step mutation/selection/etc accounts.
Behe is of course free to adopt any standards of evidence he chooses, and to change them at any time (if he thinks he needs a movie of the evolution of the immune system to accept it happened, so be it). But he has to apply his standards consistently, which means recognizing that by such standards we have no satisfying evidence of pretty much anything ever having evolved or possibly evolving (including trivial evolutionary processes like onset of some forms of pesticide or antibiotic resistance), which would of course make IC entirely unremarkable, a “hurdle” for evolution just like any other. It also has the drawback of being a more extreme antievolutionary position than that of Answers in Genesis, CRI etc.
The big problem is, of course, that these new standards cannot be applied to anything in science: we just don’t require infinitely detailed and complete explanations not only for evolutionary biology, but for any other fields of inquiry. We still don’t know what gravity really is, but sure no one would argue that this invalidates or raises doubts about gravitational theory. We also don’t need proof that everything around us is made of atoms to accept atomic theory, we just need to confirm critical predictions of the theory and observe that it is consistent with everything else we observe.
That is precisely what Judge Jones remarked – Behe may personally dismiss the papers supporting the evolution of the immune system without even reading them, because he thinks they patently don’t fulfill his own standards, but by doing so he is just rejecting the standards everyone else in science uses. From that position, unfortunately, it’s hard to argue one is still doing science.
Andrea,
Why don’t you summarize for us just how the 58 documents/book sections showed how the immune system evolved through a neo Darwinism mechanism. There is obviously no need to quote them all but just the findings in those that are most crucial. That may help us evaluate which documents to read first if you could point out the most relevant studies.
Then we can then ask questions so we can learn more about the process.
Thank you in advance.
Strange:
Behe made a claim that there was no evidence for the evolution of the immune system.
That is false. The issue isn’t “evolution” but the MECHANISM!
To Andrea,
Perhaps the anti-IDists and ID critics should take their own advice and STOP holding ID to a higher standard than all other ideas. However I doubt they will let that happen- they cannot for obvious reasons.
jerry:
I cannot obviously summarize 58 papers here (or do it better than what Nick Matzke has done in the annotated bibliography linked to above). However, to address only the specific issue of Behe’s claim that the immunoglobulin recombination systems “dooms all Darwinian explanations to frustration”, I discussed how the evidence in fact ended up supporting the explanations Behe initially rejected here:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/arc.....ge_of.html
and discussed the implications of Behe’s reply (where he reiterated the demand for infinite detail) here:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/arc.....ingle.html
I should add that since I wrote those essays, one more piece of the puzzle has fallen into place: scientists have identified the predicted homologue of the RAG2
component in non-vertebrates:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/103/10/3728 .
joseph:
scientists do NOT want to hold ID to a higher standard than all other ideas, they want it to be held to the same standards as the rest of science. That’s why it is ID advocates who have asked to change the standards of science, to allow it accomodate ID, and not vice-versa.
Interesting paper on PNAS submitted as evidence by Andrea. Long post, but felt it required appropriate highlighting and commentary.
“In the extreme extension of this scenario, the prototypes of Rag1 and Rag2 encoded the transposase component of a mobile DNA element that jumped into the genome of a common ancestor of the modern jawed vertebrates.”
Our evolution story continues…
“Then, as an intact transposon or through a nonautonomous element under its control, the proto-Rag genes reversibly disrupted a primordial antigen receptor gene locus (4, 7).”
Well, not to fast, maybe it did not happen that way…
“Other variants of this hypothesis suggest that the Rag1 core region was derived from a transposable element early in animal evolution and that the Rag1/2 cluster may have been assembled much later in a jawed vertebrate ancestor (6).”
Which leads to…
“The evolutionary shift that presumably accompanied this event correlates with the phylogenetically inferred rapid appearance of the entire complex of Ig/TCR/MHC-mediated adaptive immunity (3, 8, 9). The suggested sudden emergence of this system has been referred to as an immunological “big bang” (10).
Tada! just love that astronomy comparison. Warning: satirical ending…
In the distant past our hero Prototype was “presumably accompanied” by an “evolutionary shift” that compares in size to an astronomical “big bang”, but this is immunological and
therefore “evolutionarily” unquestionable.
Some more highlighting to think upon….
“This hypothesis is supported in the form of negative evidence by the inability to identify direct homologs of Rag1 and Rag2, and by the lack of functionally similar homologs of genes encoding TCR, Ig, and MHC Class I/II molecules from animals outside of the jawed vertebrates, including two completely sequenced urochordate genomes (11).”
Alternatively, the apparent phylogenetic discontinuity in adaptive immunity genes could be a consequence of gene loss and undersampling, and a longer and more gradual evolutionary process may underlie the emergence of the key elements of the vertebrate adaptive immune system (12).”
Maybe it was not a big bang afterall, and different opinions are allowable – but only within the context of “evolutionary scenarios”. It has nothing to do at all with other possible correlations that may be discovered in the future for overall design considerations.
“Sea urchins are echinoderms, a sister group of the chordates. The Rag1/2 gene cluster is predicted to be missing in this phylum by evolutionary scenarios in which the locus was assembled as a consequence of horizontal gene transfer close to the time of the emergence of jawed vertebrate
adaptive immunity. This study now reveals the unexpected presence of a Rag1/2-like cluster in the purple sea urchin with similarities on the levels of genomic structure and organization, regulation of expression, and properties of the encoded proteins.”
So which is it? Predicted to be missing and unexpected, or predicted to be found? And why is it limited to “similarities”.
Any story of evolution speculation by RM and genomic structure similarities does not prove evolution anymore than a theory of design might use similar structures.
This still falls in line with classification. Deeper yes, but not truly understanding the underlying mechanisms. Otherwise there would not be “unexpected” surprises.
It is scientist with use of comparative analysis that can make predictions and it is engineers based molecular scientist in the future who will unravel many mysteries of design.
The real mystery is why Tunicate subphylum members of the Animal Kingdom produce cellulose(the only members to do so) and are not a member of the Plant Kingdom like the carnivorous Venus Flytrap.
But then “restraint” of evolution has an answer for everything as the Venus Flytrap evolved to trap flies in its nutritionally deficient soil:
“The nutritional poverty of the soil is the reason that the plant has evolved to have such elaborate traps: insect prey provide the nitrogen for protein formation that the soil cannot. The venus flytrap is not a tropical plant and can tolerate mild winters.” (as quoted from wiki).
My hand is slowly evolving a sticky substance onto which all cash sticks….