Ducks all the way down

Michael Behe, a leading creationist, wrote an article on “intelligent design” in the NY Times the other day. There are plenty willing to put the boot into Behe but I couldn’t resist getting my kicks in. My critique follows:

IN the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design.

It should be noted that the legal challenge to having evolution taught has failed dismally, most recently with the court’s ordering that stickers pushing an antievolution message may not be used in Cobb County, Georgia.
Nor is intelligent design a “rival theory” on two counts. First, it is not a theory as anyone acquainted with science would understand it. A theory is a framework for explanation, a set of guidelines if you like that explain how observations can be arranged. The theory is a model of how the world actually is. If the model is accurate, it will coincide with the world, so that parts of the world that have not been observed but are included in the theory will match the theory’s model. Because of this, theories can be used to make predictions, which the observable facts may or may not fit. If they do not fit, you know that your theory, or the principle that forms a particular part of it, cannot be right. Depending on how many facts don’t fit, or how important those facts are to the principle, your theory needs to be modified or abandoned.
Intelligent design is not able to make predictions. None of its proponents has used it to make one. It is not a model of the world. Nor does it explain measurable facts. What it tries to explain is our impressions of the facts. It says nothing more than “this is how things seem to be”. But science specifically does not deal in how things seem to be. It models how they actually are. I learned this in my first physics class.
Second, intelligent design is not a “rival” to evolutionary theory. The latter has an immense body of evidence backing it. It is one of the best-founded theories of our world We rely on it in biology and it influences our understanding of many other areas. It has revolutionised medicine. There is no exterior evidence of intelligent design, as I will show.


As one of the scientists who have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not.

Confusion that charlatans such as Behe have worked hard to create! At the base of the confusion is the notion that evolution and intelligent design are on the same footing as conjectures about life and its origins. They are both “theories” in the common parlance. But Behe is himself a scientist. He’s well aware that they do not equivalate.


First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments.

Which leads one to ask: if the “intelligence” that designed life is not the Christian God, what is it?
This is of course a lie fundamental to the ID movement. Why? Because it is trying to pass creationism off as science, so that it can be taught in American public schoolrooms. There is far too much precedent that has demonstrated that you may not push your religious ideas there thanks to the First Amendment and creationists learned that to proselytise in America they must wrap their religion in a coat of “science”.
But an intelligence that designs life is, by definition, supernatural and, Behe is aware, the supernatural is excluded from science, which is confined to naturalistic explanations of the world. So he must try to pass off the intelligence involved as a sort of variable, a cosmological constant of biology.


For example, a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator.

Which is at heart precisely what ID does mean.


That's misleading. Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life.

So they do have the belief that “if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection”.
Replace “omniscient creator” with “an intelligent designer of some sort” and the “caricature” is exactly what ID does believe.
It should be pointed out that the theory of evolution is not a “belief”. It is a model of how the world might be. Other models are allowed – encouraged – because the model does not express a truth; it does not reflect the world, as beliefs do, but shows what the truth could be.


But they do not doubt that evolution occurred.

They used to but so much evidence of it was presented that they realised they would quickly be exposed as antiscientific if they continued to claim it had not. The public had become too aware that antibiotic resistance in bacteria, for example, is a product of evolution.
Opponents of the theory of evolution rely on evolution’s having largely occurred in a past that we cannot directly observe. They are able to claim that it might not have happened because it cannot be demonstrated in a lab. Some even say it isn’t scientific because it cannot be observed in laboratory conditions. This is to be laughed at, so naïve a conception of what science is does it represent.


And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.

But the question remains what the “intelligent designer” is if it is not a creator that matches the religious concept.


Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic.

As a long-time user of the Uselessnet and other combat zones, my ears prick up when the word “logic” gets an outing. On the Uselessnet, a correspondent who promises “logic” is generally not going to be employing any. They will be using an argument in steps that seems to them to be inarguable but they will not employ logic at all. Behe obliges beautifully by not even attempting to be logical.


The argument for it consists of four linked claims. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.

Erm. Well, I’d say that the first claim is not “uncontroversial”. We don’t actually often see design in “nature”. What we do see are the marks of man on nature. We know that plate tectonics and erosion did not create Mt Rushmore because its creators are known to us. You can see where this argument is going from this point! Replace “plate tectonics and erosion” with “natural selection”, “Mt Rushmore” with “life” and you have the whole of Behe’s argument in a nutshell. It is clear, I think, that his pretence to argue from design to designer is hollow. We see design in Mt Rushmore because we know it had a designer. If it had not, would we assume that it had been created by people? We might assume that it’s one explanation but before we jump to conclusions we should remind ourselves that there are other formations that look enough like human artefacts that they have been given names like so and so’s chair, so and so’s bucket, whatever, but we can be sure that they were not fashioned by humans. To allow Behe’s point, we must demand of him that he can formalise the correspondence between Mt Rushmore and other artefacts that allows it to be identified as “designed”, so that the generalisation can be used in other areas. This is the hallmark of the theory, remember: the general principle that is used to explain new facts. In short, Behe must give a principle that explains why we would take Mt Rushmore to have been designed if we saw it and did not know that it had been carved by whoever it was carved it.


Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed. Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too.

Is it? This is in fact the heart of the controversy over ID. The argument of ID boils down to “everything is designed because it looks like it’s designed”. However, the theory of evolution explains that things look like they’re designed because a selective process has fashioned them.
Well, surely this makes the two equivalent and they should be taught as such? The problem is that ID is not an explanation of how things are but a means to avoid explaining it. It doesn’t explain how life was designed! It merely says it was. Remember, science does not describe how things are: it does not offer truths. It models how things might be. When you are modelling how things might be, breadth is important. It’s better to explain more rather than less.
Imagine if we took this approach to other areas of science. Alongside Newton’s laws we would learn heliopositioning theory. This theory says that an intelligent positioner put the sun where it is. The evidence is that it’s in a really convenient position for providing energy to life on earth. Its first claim is that it’s clear to us that some things are put in useful positions: the chair in my loungeroom is in front of the TV and not in the front yard; the bed is in a separate room to the TV, so that the latter doesn’t keep me awake if I retire early; the bus stop is next to the road and not inside someone’s house. The second claim is that you can recognise positioning in the world. Rivers flow into the sea or lakes. It would be disastrous if they did not because they would flood all the land and there would be nowhere to build houses. Places gulls nest – cliffs – are conveniently next to places they find food – the sea.


The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.

The limits on the imagination of the ID “theorist” are exposed. There is a simple explanation for the “appearance of design”. Design is something we perform to fit things to their purpose. So it is tempting to assume that where there is fitness, there is design. It is doubly tempting to mistake ends for purposes.
The wind blows a sycamore seed through the air. The seed lands far from the tree and a new sycamore can be born. The purpose of the wind is to blow the seed.
Hang on, something wrong there, isn’t there? Even though the wind fits the end of the sycamore, it does not exist for any purpose. We can happily explain the wind without referring to “design”.
We know what a watch is but say we didn’t. Would we recognise it as designed? Well, it clearly has features of other things that we know were designed. It carries numbers, it has a glass face, if we open it up we can see gearing. Even if we didn’t know what its purpose was, we know that those things have purposes.
If we knew nothing of the purpose of any of the parts of a watch, would we know it had been designed?


For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, once wrote that biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved. (Imagine a scientist repeating through clenched teeth: "It wasn't really designed. Not really.")

Indeed. Crick is of course cautioning scientists against taking the easy route out and accepting a simple but false explanation. He is directing them to find the route by which a thing evolved and not fall prey to the ready satisfaction of waving away difficulties by the suggestion that they were designed. What I think he would agree with is the suggestion that one must not confuse purposes with ends. An organism might suffer a mutation that has the end of making it fitter but it will never have a mutation with that purpose. Life does not try to evolve. It doesn’t aim for an end. The ends come to it.
That one should not accept the easy solution is a commonplace in science, which aims to go beyond the “obvious”. After all, it was so obvious to our forebears that malaria was caused by bad air that they named it that.
I remember being on a bus in the Casamance, in Senegal. It was Ramadan. A policeman asked me if I was fasting. No, I said, I am not a Muslim. A Christian, then, he said. No, I said, I didn’t have a god at all. Some of the men on the bus were astonished. It’s obvious there is a god, they said. Where there is rice, there was a seed the plant grew from, and a man planted the seed (actually, a woman planted it, since they do nearly all the fieldwork, but that’s another story). There is life, there must be a god, they said. C’est evident! How did man come to be, they asked. (This was a real stretch for my French!) I said he had evolved from monkeys. The bus rocked with their laughter.


The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined.

Well, it would be if watches were generally jerrybuilt from twigs and bits of gravel, with the occasional inexplicable feature.


In the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules.

Behe hopes to mystify the rubes by introducing the idea that machines are made of molecules. Wow, thinks the rube. Machines. Made of molecules. Sounds very techological. Of course, everything is made of molecules! Designed or otherwise.


There are little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.

But the “little molecular trucks” do not in fact look like trucks at all. We suggest they are like trucks specifically because we make the analogy with our own products.
They are not trucks but like trucks. ID exploits the human need to understand by analogy. It is one of the ways we build new knowledge. We take a pattern that we understand and generalise it to the new. To explain cellular transport mechanisms we take the metaphor of the truck and apply it. But there are no trucks. The molecules do not have little wheels, gearboxes and guys with tattoos driving them.
Nor are flagella actually much like outboard motors. They remind us of them because they use the same principle. They don’t have little petrol motors though.
Only a man of such limited imagination would be astonished that nature could hit upon the same ideas for its structures as we do. You’d think that we were not ourselves part of nature, or that the notion of, for example, twirling a thing in a liquid to propel another thing was particularly complex.


In 1998 an issue of the journal Cell was devoted to molecular machines, with articles like "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines" and "Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks, Springs and Things."

Only a charlatan would try to mislead the reader by the suggestion that because we describe molecular structures as machines that implies they were made by somebody. He relies on the notion that “machines” are something that people make to do things (which is of course where the word comes from).
But hang on. The sun could be described as a vast machine. It has a structure that works to fuse nuclei and create enormous amounts of energy. Elevators move the energy to its surface and ejectors push it out into space. I could push the metaphor if I wanted but it’s clear that the use of words creates the idea of “machineness” not an intrinsic property of things.

Referring to his student days in the 1960's, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that "the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered."

Yes, cells are complex.
But we used to consider that the insides of humans were regulated by four “humours” and that these created our personalities. We now know that our insides are much more “elaborate and sophisticated” than anything we ever considered. We know that because we stopped settling for the “obvious” answer and looked deeper.


In fact, Dr. Alberts remarked, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. He emphasized that the term machine was not some fuzzy analogy; it was meant literally.

Dr Alberts does say that we should call the cellular structures in question “machines” because they are like humanmade machines. We call cells cells because they are like little rooms, seams of minerals veins and roads arteries, neurons transmitters and we even call the thing on the bottom of your foot an arch. In none of these cases are we led to draw the conclusion that the use of same name implies anything more than a superficial similarity.

The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence.

This is quite simply a downright lie. We have several good explanations for the “foundation of life”. None has prevailed but this doesn’t mean that they do not exist.
Yet again we must remind ourselves that science does not seek to show what is, only what might be. So it is content to consider how life might have arisen, which it can give an answer to, and not how it did, which it cannot.

Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time.

Sorry, how is that where thoughtful people part company? Darwinists do not believe that the “foundation of life” has anything to do with their theory. Darwin himself described how life evolved from one or a few original organisms. He suggested that they were created and was content to leave it at that. That’s because he was writing a theory of the origin of species, not of the origin of life itself. The theory of evolution does not concern itself with how life arose because it is entirely immaterial to it.

Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified.

Those “scientists” don’t tend to actually be biologists, though, Behe forgets to mention.

They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.

Another lie. There are many, many studies showing exactly this. What Behe would go on to say when presented with the truth of this is that yes, there are studies showing how the molecular machines might have evolved but no lab studies reproducing evolution.
We would at this point have to remind Behe that suggesting that one must reproduce evolution to show that there is a mechanism for it is rather like suggesting one must restage the battle of Waterloo to show that it happened in a particular way.
Science describes, just as history describes. It doesn’t have to become the thing it describes to describe it!

Scientists skeptical of Darwinian claims include many who have no truck with ideas of intelligent design, like those who advocate an idea called complexity theory, which envisions life self-organizing in roughly the same way that a hurricane does, and ones who think organisms in some sense can design themselves.

In the former case, one wonders whether Behe actually knows what complexity theory is (I presume he means Kauffman’s theory of autocatalysis). Kauffman is not so much “sceptical of Darwinian claims” as interested in providing an explanation for how order can arise in large systems. In a nutshell, he is saying no more than that you might have several things that on their own do not have a property and when you put them together the property emerges. Hello. We call that a football team. We call it sex (so long as your sex takes at least two). We call it the bleeding obvious. It is not “antiDarwinian”. It is “nothing to do with Darwin”. If a thousand men run pellmell, they are a mob. If they march in step, they make an army. Kauffman is suggesting that molecules fell into step with one another. This does not exclude evolution for obvious reasons: in particular, that the molecules can be said to have evolved the ability to close the catalytic circle. The hurricane reference comes about because many have compared complexity theory to chaos theory. We’re all familiar with the butterfly effect. The spontaneous generation of life is supposed to be like a biochemical butterfly effect. It goes without saying that if Kauffman were right, his theory would be a strong disproof of ID! Behe is too clownish to realise that your enemy’s enemy is not always your friend.
I don’t know what Behe’s referring to when he discusses scientists who believe life designs itself. I suspect that “in some sense” hides the truth, which will turn out to be much less complimentary to ID.

The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life.

I’ll say it’s controversial. Behe is arguing that if you cannot find an explanation for a thing that convinces him, this proves that his explanation is correct.
Readers of the Times probably didn’t note the word “convincing”. It is crucial. Why? Because in science if there is only one hypothesis, it wins so long as it is not falsified.
This is because science is not about what is but what might be. So if heliopositioning theory is the only available explanation for why the sun is where it is, it is the “correct” theory. This does not mean that the sun is where it is because a positioner put it there. This is a mistake people make with science. They do not understand that the competition is between explanations, and the prize is to be the explanation, not the truth that is explained. What’s the difference? Well, thinking about a punch in the face and a description of a punch in the face is a good way of conceptualising it. The description can be very vivid, extremely accurate, unflawed as a means of telling you what a punch in the face is like. But it won’t break your nose.
But “convincing” is the key word here because Behe forgets to mention who must be convinced. You could be forgiven for thinking that he must mean “scientists” or “thinking people”. No. He means the American public. If you cannot come up with anything else to wow the rubes, my theory wins: that is the long and short of his message!

To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.

Wrong. It’s the appearance of whatever is appearing that everyone is labouring to explain. I’m surprised that Behe so outrightly shows how he and his cadres try to slant the discussion. They are not seeking to explain what they see. They are seeking to explain how they have interpreted what they see.
But biology is about seeking to explain what you see, not why you think it is like something else. The latter is a question for metaphysics.

The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck.

Here is the essential flaw in Behe’s argument: “it’s a duck” is the whole of his “theory”. It begins with “there is a duck”. The duck is axiomatic! What do I mean?
Behe’s “theory” has as an axiom that there is such a thing in nature as design (that there is such a thing as a duck). But his argument seeks to prove that because things in nature look designed (that they quack like ducks) they are things in nature that are designed (they are ducks).
But Professor Behe, it’s ducks all the way down.

Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.

He would be laughed out of the place if he said “geocentricism should not be overlooked because it’s so obvious” or if he picked up a pebble from the beach and said “it looks so much like it has been polished by human hands, let’s not throw out that suggestion just because it’s so obvious”. (In the latter case, one would take the two hypotheses: humans did it and sea did it and compare them. How can we compare ID and natural selection? ID simply states the “obvious”: goddidit. It takes the line that because it looks like it was designed (looks like it was polished by human hands) it is “logically” inescapable that it must have been designed (it must have been polished by human hands).

Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there.

But science does. It did not settle for Newton. It kept looking and Einstein found more. It did not settle for the atom theory. It kept looking and Bohr et al found more. It did not settle for the argument from design. It kept looking and Darwin found more.
Science never stops looking.

But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore.

You what? Ten dollars to anyone who can explain what “But we can’t settle questions about reality with definitions” means.

Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed.

Fair enough, Professor Behe. Do not accept whatever “special restrictions” scientists adopt for themselves. But do not pretend that you are doing science.

And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design.

Many? I note that he doesn’t give a figure. It’s actually very few, isn’t it?

And tellingly, Professor Behe does not teach ID himself in his classes, nor does he do research into it. Why? Because Behe, like any scientist, is aware that there is a dividing line between science, the inquiry into what might be, and religion, the prescription of what is, and he knows well which side of it ID falls.

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:03 pm