The Open Letters File

Way to go Ian, execellent job!

An excellent piece of scholarship, sir. We thank you.

Something very unusual happened: having found himself in a corner because of the well substantiated and professionally written Open Letters by Dr. Musgrave, and facing the choice, either to stubbornly continue refusing to admit his mistakes, thus damaging his already seriously damaged reputation even further, or finally admit that the "mere grad student," and "a woman" bested him, Dr. Behe made a step in a right direction. He admitted that he was wrong. I applaud his admission.

While this may serve to partially repair Behe's standing in the scientific community, this must be just the first step. To recover the respect of scientists (rather than of ID advocates) Dr. Behe should (besides an apology to Abbie Smith) finally respond to many other critical comments to his pro-ID work, and admit his errors pointed out by a number of critics. One example is my critique of Behe's treatment of probabilities and complexity (see for example here and here), to which Behe has not been responding for eight years.

The above story shows a possible reason for Behe's ignoring critique such as that I offered: if he likewise simply ignored Abbie's posts, he would not face the hard choice between admitting his error and defending an indefensible position.

For a scientist with many years of work behind him, Behe's 35 scientific publications is not a very impressive record. Now Dr. Behe has an opportunity to respond finally to critique such as that I suggested, to admit that his treatment of probabilities and complexity was inadequate, and return to a biochemical lab for a real research instead of writing books aimed at gaining cheap popularity among general population and an acclaim by the ID crowd. That is the only way he may recover a respectable standing in the scientific community.

Congratualtions! Getting Behe to admit that he is wrong about anything is a major accomplishment. We should make sure that this public admission of error is freely available to all who want to see it. We also need to carefully document the lengths that ERV and Ian had to go to in order to get this one grudging admission. Maybe then people will realize that Behe is just as wrong about almost everything else he says as well.

The mere fact that he was wrong about something is not the important thing. As many have pointed out, scientists are wrong about things all the time. The difference is that they are usually not wrong because they made sweeping generalizations in a field they know nothing about and ignored all evidence that contradicted them. They usually admit that they were wrong when the evidence is provided without stooping to name calling and sexist remarks to try to divert attention from the fact that they were simply wrong. One simple rebuttal article is usually enough for a real scientist to admit error, or come up with more evidence in support of his thesis.

The fact that it took this much effort to get Behe to admit that he was wrong about one relatively minor point shows that his arguments are not driven by evidence but by willful ignorance. Why not just admit that this one example was a mistake and that he reaslly isn't an expert in this particular field? Why not stick to the examples in his own field that have solid evidence ... what? ... oh, never mind.

Now to get him to admit that he was wrong about saying that the immune system couldn't have evolved.

He admitted he was wrong, but in a very grudging and ungracious manner.

I must admit I am having second thoughts...I mean what did Behe do really with his apology??

I mean, you basically have a complex mixture of interacting components inside Behe called traits. These were past from his ancestors. He is simply the end result of an endless number of natural interactions which designed the being you see before you. Evolution wise, they guy was incapable of doing anything else, his genes made the apology happenlong before Behe was born, so were probably giving him way to much credit. Do we thank the ATM machine that gives us our money? No we expect it to perform as design based on its original plan, modified through constant improvement as with the intriduction of new models.
Proteins do much of the chemical work inside Behes' cells, so they largely determine what those traits are. But those proteins owe their existence to Behe's DNA, so that is where we must look for the origins of this apology.

Come to think of it, Behe was barely involved in the apology process, just a speck at the end of a Billion year line leading to the ability to apologize.

Behe's admission of error doesn't even count, because he also dishonestly stated that the error was not significant to his thesis, when clearly it was. Behe hasn't admitted error where it actually counts, in terms of demonstrating to his acolytes that the entire basis of the book is wrong.

Unbelievable. They're still defending him

http://www.uncommondescent.com/education/pbs-airs-false-facts-in-its-inherit-the-wind-version-of-the-kitzmiller-trial/

I admit I don't know much (ok, any!) about this topic, but from what I can read, it looks to me like they're just picking nits. That sound about right?

What would it take for thos people to finally admit that they (or their chosen representative) was wrong, and a "darwinian" critic was right?

It would be interesting if we could have some kind of substantive historical comparison between Behe's response to critiques and some other examples of scientists changing their minds about pet theories. I cannot recall who said it, but the notion that long term change in scientific thought requires the passing on of the original proponents of a theory is rather intriguing here. Clearly most scientists are more than willing to change their minds in the face of some good evidence. At the same time most prominent theories due seem to have adherents who cling to the bitter end inspite of evidence nearly everyone else has found more than convincing. I wonder to what extent their is a psychological parallel in the two sets of behavior.

Reynold Hall: What would it take for thos people to finally admit that they (or their chosen representative) was wrong, and a "darwinian" critic was right?

Not only "grudging and ungracious," but in his 5th and final (?) post, Behe still claims an exception for cellular proteins:

"Cellular proteins must continually exist in a confined space, dense with many other cellular proteins, and so they are normally selected to not bind to most other cellular proteins. In other words, for eons the surfaces of cellular proteins have been honed so as to not interact with almost any other protein in a very concentrated cellular milieu."

That argument would have had me going 10 years ago, which means that even the subset of his target audience that's not hopelessly compartmentalized might give him the point on that round. But the overriding point is that, even if there are no good "before and after" examples of cellular protein changes in a eukaryote lineage (thanks to poor fossilization if cellular compounds), Behe is clear that "impressive" mutations (those beyond the "edge") must have occurred, just by looking at closely related species. So the question everyone should be asking is "Why on earth is he avoiding looking for them and, heaven forbid, testing them?" Even if (combining Dembski's and Nelson's admissions) Behe has no "mechanistic theory," and nothing more than a "bag of powerful intuitions," he should be able to use his calculations to pinpoint when, and in what lineages, those "i-mutations" occurred. Oh, and be clear whether or not they are indeed "design actuation events."

Technical refutations are valuable and necessary, but Behe's complete refusal to elaborate on his ideas, in contrast to his endless elaboration on "Darwinism," is the most devastating argument against them. Second, or maybe tied, is the refusal of Behe and those IDers who appear to think that "i-abiogenesis" occurs in lieu of "i-mutations" to openly debate their differences, as real scientists do.

I read through some of the critiques and if was rather odd to see them saying of course it could have evolved it's got all this population to sacrifice to natural selection? What I find intriguing is that they don't seem to realize that is exactly what has been promoted for years. Given sufficient time populations are able to sample all the sequence space they need to evolve new functions if they are useful.
There claim is the equivalent of saying that in the 200+ dimensions of an enzyme there are no connections between associated areas of functions. Considering that humans really struggle to imagine 1 extra dimension. How would one have enough arrogance to believe that I can accurately reason that these kind of connections between different functions don't exist in sequence space? We've already located numerous examples of close contacts in sequence space. It just so happens that all of the different possibilities make it a rather long term problem to work out every detail.

Stanton I think it would be a mistake to say that, because you could not prove to that person that it was not in fact the devil testing their faith.

If God were to tell them, “you were wrong, Darwin was right.”

Come to think of it, Behe was barely involved in the apology process, just a speck at the end of a Billion year line leading to the ability to apologize.

As far as I can tell, the commenters at UD seem to primarily be arguing that this is within the limits of the EoE. For example:

[quote]Don’t fall into Musgrave’s trap of conflating the two examples of minor Darwinian evolution. The whole point is that something like this might be expected to be within the powers of Darwinism for viruses. The problem is that they’re taking the factors surrounding viruses and extrapolating that as somehow providing evidence for higher organisms even though the situation is very different.[/quote]

Bornagain also accuses Ian of dishonesty in his population numbers argument :

[quote]In Musgrave’s attempt to get around Dr. Behe’s hard number of 10^10 for HIV he tries to use the smoke and mirrors of effective population size used in population Genetics. Yet I looked at Behe’ sources in His book and they do in fact take into account the effective population size that is used in population genetics to arrive at there number. So Behe’s number is thoroughly thought out and firm as a rock.[/quote]

Leading to this strong accusation:

[quote]In my opinion this was a desperate attempt at distortion on your part and you should be ashamed to call yourself a scientist, since apparently finding the truth has no meaning for you![/quote]

http://www.uncommondescent.com/education/pbs-airs-false-facts-in-its-inherit-the-wind-version-of-the-kitzmiller-trial/

This "distortion" led bornagain to investigate the binding site that "is so impressed with":

[quote]From my limited knowledge of the subject, it seems the protein/protein binding site he is so excited about, is actually a additional “refining” protein binding site of the one that actually allowed the HIV to gain access to humans in the first place.[/quote]

http://www.uncommondescent.com/education/pbs-airs-false-facts-in-its-inherit-the-wind-version-of-the-kitzmiller-trial/#comment-149133

Apologies for the messed up quotes!

his rationale for excluding viral protein-cellular protein binding has no biological basis (and is inconsistent).

There's some pretty comical comments over at UD. I'll let the biophreaks handle the relevant content, I just have to note this from "Patrick":

"The oddball part is that none of these examples have enough informational bits to be CSI."

And not a calculation in sight, as if we needed another demonstration that CSI was a meaningless catch-phrase used primarily to provide a simulacrum of mathematical legitimacy.

JGW said[#135635]: "There [sic] claim is the equivalent of saying that in the 200+ dimensions of an enzyme there are no connections between associated areas of functions."
ID wonks enjoy painting mental pictures of "hills" in fitness space that can only be traversed through lower-fitness, thus unselectable, "valleys." In dozens or hundreds of dimensions, however, absolute hilltops are rare to the point of nonexistence. Even if half a dozen dimensions reach a maximum simultaneously, a couple of others are still trending upward. Please, all you biologists, don't let them get away with this inaccurate 3D oversimplification.

(Don't overheat your brains with the visualizations. Even the most hardened mathematicians cannot begin to encompass the 196,883 dimensions of the Monster Group.)

"Don’t fall into Musgrave’s trap of conflating the two examples of minor Darwinian evolution. The whole point is that something like this might be expected to be within the powers of Darwinism for viruses. The problem is that they’re taking the factors surrounding viruses and extrapolating that as somehow providing evidence for higher organisms even though the situation is very different."

So, let's see, Behe claims that this is something that viruses just can't do through natural means and therefore he concludes that all of evolution must be wrong. He is shown to be absolutely wrong and the response, well you still haven't proven that anything else can do this. Bite me. You prove that they can't.

Mutations occur in all organisms. All organisms undergo selection. What could possibly stop this type of adaptation from happening in any organism given enough time. The evidence is very clear that indeed it has happened many times. Ignoring the evidence is pure ignorance and stupidity.

Behe claimed that if you couldn't find this type of change in viruses then it would be unlikely that such changes could occur in other organisms. Since he was proven to be wrong, it does not imply by any stretch of logic that anyone has proven that it could not occur in other organisms. Indeed, if it can occur in just a few years in viruses, it is almost inevitable that things like this would occur in other organisms given enough time. No one ever claimed that this proves that it can happen in other organsism, just that the result is consistent with all the other evidence that shows that it in fact did.

When you are proven to be wrong admit it and move on. No one will respect anything else.

Yes, I’m perfectly willing to concede that this does appear to be the development of a new viral protein-viral protein binding site, one which I overlooked when writing about HIV.

Could someone please enlighten me as to what, exactly, Behe's "restricted choice" is? As applied to both HIV and malaria,it sounds an awful lot like variation and natural selection to me. The more I read his retractions and corrections, the more his "theory" changes to sound like Darwinian evolution. Pretty soon, I think he'll just back himself into a corner and declare that ID and evolution are compatible and he thought of them both.
Mendelian geneticists watch out - you're next I think. Designer genes and all that.

Back to lurking.

Olorin has just inspired the next Cranks Cluedo post. Thanks Olorin!

If I were a Darwinian evolutionist I might suggest that Behe was passed down the apology trait due to males wanting to mate with females, thus they needed the apology trait in order to get the women to agree to mating.

Thus Behe not so much apologized to Ian, but said he wanted to have sex with him....in an evolutionary sense..

Of course a modern terminology for such an act would be F-ck You! So maybe Behe wasn't apoogizing after all, just speaking in a language a Darwinian Evolutionist would understand.

I suspect that Bach's post can be attributed to repressed fantasies.

That incredibly mature mode of thinking Bach is exactly the same kind of sloppy reasoning that somehow twists natural selection into a theory that "demands" Eugenics. It's OK Bach my school has some opening in it's 7th grade and we teach both Virtue and Logic.

Typo's fixed! Thanks folks, I had to write this (and indeed most of the series) late at night after marking exams, so my attention to spelling, even with the help of spell checkers, was not what it could have been.

JGB--

Famous cases of scientists admitting they were wrong include Arthur Smith Woodward's acceptance of the "Taung Child," Raymond's Dart's skull of a juvenile Australopithicus africanus, as a hominid. It took Woodward a long time, but, fortunately, Dart lived a long time.

Linus Pauling, on the other hand, admitted Watson and Crick's model of DNA was right and his own was wrong even before Watson and Crick's paper was published in Nature.

Richard Leakey took longer to admit the date of 2.9 my for the "1470" skull, discovered in 1972, was wrong. The currently accepted date is 1.8 my. But he did back down eventually. (Bornagain, on the other hand, is still using a Leakey quote from the period when Leakey was defending the older date, although I have now corrected him a total of four times!)

Lord Kelvin hedged his bets when he claimed the earth couldn't be more than some hundreds of thousands of years old, and added something like "unless a completely new form of energy is discovered." So when atomic energy was discovered, nobody had to say the great man was wrong. They called him "prescient!"

But if you really want an example of a scientist backing down on his pet theory, read Francis Crick's "What Mad Pursuit." He practically gloats about some of the things he got wrong. Which may explain why he had such a productive scientific career.

Bach's most recent comment has been moved to the Bathroom wall, as will any more content free spamming.

The problem is that they’re taking the factors surrounding viruses and extrapolating that as somehow providing evidence for higher organisms even though the situation is very different.

Cellular proteins must continually exist in a confined space, dense with many other cellular proteins, and so they are normally selected to not bind to most other cellular proteins. In other words, for eons the surfaces of cellular proteins have been honed so as to not interact with almost any other protein in a very concentrated cellular milieu.

Joe G wrote: "You are a liar. Page 15 of "The Edge of Evolution", Dr Behe states "The genome of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is a minute scrap of RNA, roughly one-millionth the size of the human genome."" That's nice. Unfortunately for you, he claims elsewhere in the book that the genome is DNA. Here's what Behe says on pp. 138-139: " And exactly what has all that evolution of HIV wrought? Very little. . . . Over the years its ***DNA*** sequence has certainly changed. HIV has killed millions of people, fended off the human immune system, and become resistant to whatever drug humanity could throw at it. Yet through all that, there have been no significant basic biochemical changes in the virus at all."

Thanks, Tyler, for pointing to this interesting blog. I proposed a "3D Blinders" fallacy as a comment to Cranks Cluedo.

Another subject for someone to add to the Cluedo list concerns abuses of deMoivre's results as to statistical sample sizes. Alas, I am but a lawyer, not a mathematician. See "The Most Dangerous Equation," American Scientist, May-June 2007, pp249-256 for an interesting discussion of sample-size fallacies.

Behe: "HIV has killed millions of people, fended off the human immune system, and become resistant to whatever drug humanity could throw at it. Yet through all that, there have been no significant basic biochemical changes in the virus at all."

Famous cases of scientists admitting they were wrong

Lord Kelvin hedged his bets when he claimed the earth couldn’t be more than some hundreds of thousands of years old, and added something like “unless a completely new form of energy is discovered.”

his rationale for excluding viral protein-cellular protein binding has no biological basis (and is inconsistent).

Actually, Lord Kelvin thought that the world was only a few tens of millions of years old.

Second, the viroporin is not some new molecular machine. There is no evidence that it exerts its effect in, say, an ATP- or energy-dependent manner

This situation is probably best viewed as a foreign protein degrading the integrity of a membrane, rather than performing some positive function.

Only one new binding site need develop for one area of a protein which binds to a different area of the same protein, to form a homogeneous complex with, say, C5 symmetry. That is all that is required for a circularly symmetric structure to form.

Best. Scientific. Fisking. Ever.

I said:

"Lord Kelvin hedged his bets when he claimed the earth couldn’t be more than some hundreds of thousands of years old...."

Stanton said:

"Actually, Lord Kelvin thought that the world was only a few tens of millions of years old."

In the spirit of this thread, I guess I'd better acknowledge my error!

Bornagain also accuses Ian of dishonesty in his population numbers argument:

In Musgrave’s attempt to get around Dr. Behe’s hard number of 10^10 for HIV he tries to use the smoke and mirrors of effective population size used in population Genetics. Yet I looked at Behe’s sources in His book and they do in fact take into account the effective population size that is used in population genetics to arrive at there number. So Behe’s number is thoroughly thought out and firm as a rock

It has been estimated that the total number of HIV-infected cells in a human host is between 10⁷ and 10⁸ (6). However, only a portion of infected cells produce viable viral particles that go on to infect other cells. … [estimates of infected populations] place the value at around 10³ infected cells

The viral population in an infected patient may indeed represent such a population limited in size, since current estimates of the effective population size range from 500 to 10⁵.

Lord Kelvin is one example I had thought of. Wegner's opponents to continental drift was another one. I confess that I was looking for more depth on the historical issues than I think can be fit into a single post. Particularly with continental drift it's a case of everyone being wrong. I think part of what intrigues me about the issue is that in some cases we laud people for dogged determination to a theory to see it to wide spread acceptance. And in others we are critical of scientists for sticking with a theory as it accumulates uncorrected problems. It strikes me that your probably talking about similar personality traits in both cases, and yet some are heroes and others villans (after a fashion anyway).

I admit I don't know much (ok, any!) about this topic, but from what I can read, it looks to me like they're just picking nits. That sound about right?

Could someone please enlighten me as to what, exactly, Behe's "restricted choice" is? As applied to both HIV and malaria, it sounds an awful lot like variation and natural selection to me. The more I read his retractions and corrections, the more his "theory" changes to sound like Darwinian evolution.

JGB: It would be interesting if we could have some kind of substantive historical comparison between Behe's response to critiques and some other examples of scientists changing their minds about pet theories. I cannot recall who said it, but the notion that long term change in scientific thought requires the passing on of the original proponents of a theory is rather intriguing here. Clearly most scientists are more than willing to change their minds in the face of some good evidence. At the same time most prominent theories due seem to have adherents who cling to the bitter end inspite of evidence nearly everyone else has found more than convincing. I wonder to what extent their is a psychological parallel in the two sets of behavior.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

hoary puccoon: I said: "Lord Kelvin hedged his bets when he claimed the earth couldn’t be more than some hundreds of thousands of years old...." Stanton said: "Actually, Lord Kelvin thought that the world was only a few tens of millions of years old." In the spirit of this thread, I guess I'd better acknowledge my error!

Intelligent Design is dead and the time has come to bury the rotting corpse. And since ID was also the last attempt to resurrect the zombie of Creationism, dress it up in new clothes and try to make it respectable again, the ID promoters, including Behe, have actually signed the death warrent of the faith of a great many people who may have once beleived in them.

Stanton said: Had he lived after the discovery of radioactivity, he would have realized that rock can stay molten for much longer periods of time, i.e. billions of years rather than millions of years, if it was constantly being irradiated.

And, in retrospect, I should have said, the earth would have stayed warm much longer than Kelvin calculated, due to radioactive energy input.

Pole Greaser: In light of the sexual practices associated with his particular den of evolutionism this could very well be not too far off the mark! All kidding aside, the Mary-worshiping evolutionist Behe has tried to carve out a space for the true God of the Bible and stumbled upon his own incoherence. His Roman Pagan theology puts on a facade about Jesus while spewing the teachings of Darwin!

Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.

I think part of what intrigues me about the issue is that in some cases we laud people for dogged determination to a theory to see it to wide spread acceptance. And in others we are critical of scientists for sticking with a theory as it accumulates uncorrected problems. It strikes me that your probably talking about similar personality traits in both cases, and yet some are heroes and others villans (after a fashion anyway).

oh it makes me sad to see people picking on cryptozoologists....it all sounds like so much fun....like daydreaming

http://tshirtinsurgency.com/

Staton writes:

"It wasn’t that Lord Kelvin hedged his bets, it was that, according to his calculations, if Earth started out as a big ball of molten rock, that 30 to 50 million years would be how long it would take for it to cool down and become solid. Had he lived after the discovery of radioactivity, he would have realized that rock can stay molten for much longer periods of time, i.e. billions of years rather than millions of years, if it was constantly being irradiated."

The basic problem with Kelvin's model was that he assummed the Earth could only cool through conduction. Had he understood the physics of convection (later explained by Rayleigh) he might reached a different conclusion.

Dr. Musgrave misunderstands my point. I did not say that Vpu acted as a nonspecific wad of chewing gum. Rather, my point is a general one, that, initially, when during the course of evolution a viral or bacterial protein is injected for the first time into a cell, it is encountering a new environment, one it hasn’t adapted to before, and which hasn’t adapted to it. In that case there are many “targets of opportunity” for the foreign protein. If by serendipity it sticks to some cellular protein to a certain degree, and that association interferes to a degree with the function of the cellular protein, then that will likely benefit the virus, and the association can be strengthened by mutations to the viral protein over time.

That’s why I put cellular protein-protein interactions in a different category from foreign protein-cellular protein interactions.

"This is part six of five responses..."

Finally, who want's to bet that Behe won't stop at five?

His claim is that for any decent binding site to get started, you need three or more simultaneous mutations.

— Ian Musgrave

I shouldn't have to remind everyone that not one of the "6 of his 5 response" is posted here, where comments are not disabled. And where those who just read Behe to get their fix of feel-good sound bites would have to see the inconvenient answers - in context.

... when during the course of evolution a viral or bacterial protein is injected for the first time into a cell, it is encountering a new environment, one it hasn’t adapted to before, ...

Add to that the constant that Einstein’s proposed to keep the universe stable.

Much later, when I was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder of his life. -- George Gamow, My World Line, 1970 [1] ... [1] It is just as well that Einstein made this remark to Gamow, otherwise Gamow would have been severely tempted to make it up.

Inoculated Mind: Behe wrote another response. Get a load of this:

Dr. Musgrave misunderstands my point. I did not say that Vpu acted as a nonspecific wad of chewing gum. Rather, my point is a general one, that, initially, when during the course of evolution a viral or bacterial protein is injected for the first time into a cell, it is encountering a new environment, one it hasn’t adapted to before, and which hasn’t adapted to it. In that case there are many “targets of opportunity” for the foreign protein. If by serendipity it sticks to some cellular protein to a certain degree, and that association interferes to a degree with the function of the cellular protein, then that will likely benefit the virus, and the association can be strengthened by mutations to the viral protein over time.

... Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.

I still think that Behe really thinks that nothing you guys point out (best fisking ever, BTW) is actually _evolution_; all those biological changes in HIV were deliberately put there by demons. I wonder when he'll finally come out and say it.

Stanton-- I don't have a library available here, but I do recall reading the same thing you and GVL Geologist mention, that Lord Kelvin estimated what the temperature of the earth should be, without calculating the effect of radioactivity (which was quite unknown at the time.) I hadn't before read, as Stuart Weinstein said, that Kelvin only knew about cooling through conduction, not convection.

I'm pretty sure, that at some point Kelvin did hedge with the caveat that his calculations held unless some unknown energy source were discovered. I wish I could remember where I read about the young scientist who had to give a talk on the recalculated (much older) age of the earth with the great man himself in the audience. That's when, based on Kelvin's caveat, he was able to say something like, "As Lord Kelvin so presciently noted...."

JGB-- Glen Davidson and I went around (politely) about the Wegener-continental drift thing in the last post Nick Matzke made before he started grad school. A number of people jumped in, with lots of detail. It wasn't so much that everyone in the original continental drift debate was wrong, as that everyone was partly right. Wegener correctly analysed the fossil data and concluded that the continents must have moved, but the mechanism he hypothesized to explain the movement was geologically impossible, as the geologists correctly pointed out. (Their basic alternative hypothesis, that species moved around on land bridges or drifting on rafts of vegetation, is, in some cases, still accepted, too.) It was only after oceanographers (literally) dredged up new data, and discovered ocean floor spreading, that the conflict could be resolved.

Lord Kelvin hedged his bets when he claimed the earth couldn’t be more than some [tens of millions] of years old, and added something like “unless a completely new form of energy is discovered.” So when atomic energy was discovered, nobody had to say the great man was wrong. They called him “prescient!”

— hoary puccoon

Horrible abuse of the apostrophe.

William E Emba noted: "The only advocates of saltationism today seem to be ex-scientists like Behe."

That's a good example of framing. From now on, we should all refer to Behe as an "ex-scientist." I'm sure his fellow biologists at Lehigh University would agree. (See http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm )

The only advocates of saltationism today seem to be ex-scientists like Behe.

— William E. Emba

It seems Mr. Behe's response is standard procedure for creationists when entering a truly scientific debate. Behe has said one thing, you've responded "false, counterexample..." and he then proceeds to take you to task, making you go to great lengths to establish your position. Always, the burden of proof is kept on evolution, because it is a positive statement of the way things work.

The effect is that, once Mr. Behe's demands are satisfied, the issue is so specific that it is necessarily very particular, and thus Mr. Behe can just give it a nod, as he did, and make the most minimal of concessions.

Expect another whopping, blanket statement about the impossibility of evolution erre long.

Dave Cerutti: It seems Mr. Behe's response is standard procedure for creationists when entering a truly scientific debate. Behe has said one thing, you've responded "false, counterexample..." and he then proceeds to take you to task, making you go to great lengths to establish your position. Always, the burden of proof is kept on evolution, because it is a positive statement of the way things work. The effect is that, once Mr. Behe's demands are satisfied, the issue is so specific that it is necessarily very particular, and thus Mr. Behe can just give it a nod, as he did, and make the most minimal of concessions. Expect another whopping, blanket statement about the impossibility of evolution erre long.

Dave Cerutti: It seems Mr. Behe's response is standard procedure for creationists when entering a truly scientific debate. Behe has said one thing, you've responded "false, counterexample..." and he then proceeds to take you to task, making you go to great lengths to establish your position. Always, the burden of proof is kept on evolution, because it is a positive statement of the way things work. The effect is that, once Mr. Behe's demands are satisfied, the issue is so specific that it is necessarily very particular, and thus Mr. Behe can just give it a nod, as he did, and make the most minimal of concessions. Expect another whopping, blanket statement about the impossibility of evolution erre long.

These letters will be a good extra bit of information, along with the Dover transcripts, to use against those guys. Escpecially when they're bragging about how good Behe is when it comes to AIDS research!

JGB wrote:

"...in some cases we laud people for dogged determination to a theory to see it to wide spread acceptance. And in others we are critical of scientists for sticking with a theory as it accumulates uncorrected problems. It strikes me that your probably talking about similar personality traits in both cases, and yet some are heroes and others villans (after a fashion anyway)."

That's an interesting point. Again, I'd say read Francis Crick's "What Mad Pursuit." Crick says something like, don't just tinker with your theory when problems come up. Look for a crucial test that will make it or break it. If it breaks, move on. Of course, Crick was advising honest scientists, not con artists like the creationists and IDers. Mike Elzinga's post, which he refers to above, describes the tactics I've seen from them pretty exactly.

Whether scientists are trying to come up with that crucial test is one gauge of whether they're "heroes or villians." Louis Agassiz, possibly the last creationist who was a legitimate scientist, went to Brazil late in his life looking for evidence of glaciation-- one could say, a crucial test of his theory. (It failed. Even in the ice ages, Brazil wasn't covered with ice.)

To be fair to Agassiz and the other catastrophists, they were correct in thinking the fossil record showed evidence of catastrophic extinctions (which Lyell, Darwin and other uniformitarians tended to deny or downplay.) They just weren't right that ALL life was extinguished and had to be restarted again and again.

That 'crucial test' criterion is one sign of serious science. Why isn't Behe in the lab, proving that his 'simultaneous mutations' are all lethal if they appear individually, and therefore must be simultaneous? Why isn't he looking at malaria where not much chloroquinine has been used and seeing if his favored mutations appear naturally in the population? Why did he care about Abbie Smith's tone in addressing him, instead of her relevant data?

Oh, yeah. I forgot-- Behe is an ex-scientist. Well, never mind.

Another characteristic that ID/Creationism has in common with other pseudo-sciences is the invention and proliferation of scientific-sounding words. These are words that have fuzzy meanings (or no meanings at all), and they are foisted onto a naive following to give the pseudo-science a patina of sophistication.

Leaders of these movements attempt to force the discussions of their claims into the language they have invented. Thus, any critic of these ideas must go through a protracted process of trying to extract the meanings of these invented words in an attempt to get any comprehensible response from the leaders and followers of these movements. During this process, the cult leaders generate more fuzzy words to explain the original fuzzy words.

Typical retorts to skeptical probing imply that the concepts are so advanced that the inertia of the science community blocks the airing of these “profound” ideas. And, of course, the originators of these words manage to drop a few hints that suggest they are among the top scientists of history.

These words also help the followers of these movements feel they have “special insights” that are denied ordinary people and jealous scientists; giving the movement social cohesiveness and a set of shibboleths to identify “outsiders”.

So words like Scientific Creationism, Complex Specified Information, Irreducible Complexity, Intelligent Design, etc. all belong to the pantheon of other famous words such as Orgone Energy, Pyramid Power, Aura, Telic Field, Vibrations; the list goes on and on.

Mike Elzinga: Another characteristic that ID/Creationism has in common with other pseudo-sciences is the invention and proliferation of scientific-sounding words. [snip] So words like Scientific Creationism, Complex Specified Information, Irreducible Complexity, Intelligent Design, etc. [snip]

A simple blanket statement like that allows them close their ears and mind.

An interesting idea for Panda's Thumb would be a dictionary of ID terms. I would allow the person who created the term to provide any required corrections or refinements to the dictionary. That way there could be no complaint about its accuracy.

Ravilyn Sanders said: "I think we should compile a glossary of these terms and demystify them."

Good idea. Let's also review the infamous "Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science," some of which certainly pertain to cdesign proponentsists:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

(http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm)

“Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science,”

Time to cast off the tedium. The Wizards of Washington; the Sages of Seattle have spoken. Design of Life is just out. Time for some "shooting fish in a barrel".

rimpal: Time to cast off the tedium. The Wizards of Washington; the Sages of Seattle have spoken. Design of Life is just out. Time for some "shooting fish in a barrel".

Rimpal wrote: "Design of Life is just out."

Announcement at http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/11/design_of_life.html

It starts by mentioning "...a small non-profit in Texas, The Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE)" It's worth going back and reading the Dover transcripts to see how the CEO of FTE repeatedly perjured himself, denying FTE is a Christian organizaion.

Here's some gems:

The new Pandas "recount(s) many of the peer-reviewed scientific papers, scientific books, and laboratory studies completed by ID theorists."

The new Pandas "also explain(s) why Darwinists have thus far failed to explain the evolution of the bacterial flagellum."

"If Darwinists reacted strongly in fear over the scientific arguments in Pandas, they will go supernova after reading The Design of Life."

Enjoy! (I wonder how many times the new Pandas mentions cdesign proponentsists?

Fast forward to 2008, and Pandas’ successor, The Design of Life, written by leading ID theorists William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, brings readers up to speed on the numerous advancements of ID over the past 20 years. Design of Life is more than twice as long as Pandas, recounting many of the peer-reviewed scientific papers, scientific books, and laboratory studies completed by ID theorists. It offers an excellent up-to-date account of ID for any reader.

Paul Burnett: Rimpal wrote: "Design of Life is just out." ..... The new Pandas "recount(s) many of the peer-reviewed scientific papers, scientific books, and laboratory studies completed by ID theorists."

Now I'm really confused. I though "Explore Evolution" was their new "design-free" replacement for "Pandas." The excerpt I read in it was classic "replacement scam": misrepresent evolution, and don't even hint what happens instead. Is it that EE is for public high schools and DOL is for college, where they are freer to discuss religious concepts in science class?

Why have Darwinists gone to such lengths to attack Pandas?

“All readers will appreciate Design of Life’s devastating critique of chemical origin of life hypotheses and hypotheses about universal common descent. The book provides piles of examples where the molecular data has conflicted with expectations of universal common ancestry and refutes the Darwinist icon that pseudogenes demonstrate that humans share common ancestors with other mammals.”

Casey Luskin:

"...Design of Life’s devastating critique of chemical origin of life hypotheses...."

Oh, good. Let's confuse evolution and abiogenesis again. That's SUCH a novel approach.

Note also the phrase: “chemical origin of life hypotheses.”

What ID activists won’t tell you is that every hypothesis of how life originated is challenged by some real scientists, and every one will of those scientists will admit those disagreements, and that there is not yet a theory of how life originated. But evolution doesn’t claim to have one, so ID can’t have it both ways. Either ID claims to be only an alternative to evolution, in which case any discussion of abiogenesis is irrelevant, or it claims to have a better hypothesis of abiogenesis. But ID provides not even a hint of its own hypotheses, either for how life originated, how subsequent species originated, or how their beloved IC systems originated.

What ID activists know that they can’t dispute is the fact that life had to originate from non-life at least once by definition, and that the best evidence indicates that it happened once or at most a few times, 3-4 billion years ago. Michael Behe, the DI’s closest thing to a real scientist, has in fact admitted that rather explicitly, and continuously for more than an decade. And despite all the suggestions by other ID activists that “Darwinists” might be wrong about it, that have not once challenged one of their own on it. Why is that?

Note in particular the clever use of the “chemical” qualifier. That serves two rhetorical purposes. One is to subtly placate the audiences who truly believe that life came from a vacuum as opposed to pre-existing matter. The other is to exploit the public’s distrust of the word “chemical.” Don’t even get me on that tangent; when it comes to “chemical,” 90+% of the people think like creationists.

hoary puccoon: Oh, good. Let's confuse evolution and abiogenesis again. That's SUCH a novel approach.

What ID activists won’t tell you is that every hypothesis of how life originated is challenged by some real scientists, and every one will of those scientists will admit those disagreements, and that there is not yet a theory of how life originated.

“Life originated from simple chemicals (we won’t say which) at some time (we won’t say when) as a result of spontaneous chemical reactions (we won’t say how).”

Add to that the constant that Einstein proposed to keep the universe stable.

— Torbjrn Larsson, OM

Well, perhaps not admitted in the sense discussed here. Einstein never said so in public AFAIU, and it isn’t certain that he said it in private [...]

Add to that the constant that Einstein proposed to keep the universe stable.

— Torbjrn Larsson, OM

Well, perhaps not admitted in the sense discussed here. Einstein never said so in public AFAIU, and it isn’t certain that he said it in private [...]

Hats off to Ian Muskgrave's "open letters" series. You're a great asset to PT and science in general. And hat's off to Behe for responding to at least some of the objections.

I hope we see some "open letters" addressed to Dembski and Wells soon regarding the latest version of Pandas.

Oops, I'll take that "k" back. No sense in wasting a perfectly good "k" (Musgrave/Muskgrave).

ID, in contrast, strives to make its hypothesis as vague as possible, to avoid any possible observational or experimental test. It is this, fundamentally, that identifies ID as religion rather than science.

— trrll

Hats off to Ian Musgrave’s “open letters” series. You’re a great asset to PT and science in general. And hat’s off to Behe for responding to at least some of the objections.

The take-away for the already convinced is: The mean ol’ Darwinistas picked some minor point and hammered it into the ground because they couldn’t refute the larger argument at a fifth-grade reading level and look: our boy Mike is still standing! ‘Tis but a flesh wound!

The take-away for the already convinced is: The mean ol’ Darwinistas picked some minor point and hammered it into the ground because they couldn’t refute the larger argument at a fifth-grade reading level and look: our boy Mike is still standing! ‘Tis but a flesh wound!

"evil minds that are unable to see and appreciate the beauty" in the exquisite design of HIV and malaria. Such Philistines we are!

The message: “How can all this beauty be the result of blind, random forces? It must have been designed.”

Ironically that makes ID even more like religion than classic creationism. At least the latter spells out some testable hypotheses regarding the whats and whens, and occasionally engages in healthy YEC-OEC debating. The problem is that, even overlooking how specific creationist hypotheses failed the tests, by the 1980s the mutually contradictory creationist positions were hopelessly deadlocked. That forced at least one “species” of creationism to adopt a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach - even before “Edwards v. Aguillard” forced the hasty relabeling of it as ID.

Ravilyn Sanders responded to me, about evolution vs. abiogenesis--

"The way the creationist mind works, “I don’t believe A, nor do I believe in B, so it proves A is identical to B”. In their mind there is really no difference between the theories about the evolution of life, the origin of life or the origin of universe. It is all scientific mumbo jumbo to them."

That's undoubtedly true for the creationist rank-and-file, Ravilyn, but for Dembski, Wells, and Luskin, I don't buy it. I think they know perfectly well that when they conflate evolution and abiogenesis they are twisting words and misleading their audience. In my darkest moments, I even suspect they take a sadistic pleasure in seeing how many lies they can get their trusting supporters to swallow.

I hope we see some "open letters" addressed to Dembski and Wells soon regarding the latest version of Pandas.

Pretty, shiny things are designed and appreciated by good people. Evil people like ugly, grotesquely shaped things that are black and produced by chaos.

Denying design because it causes terrible pain is a failure of nerve, a failure to look the universe fully in the face.

Now, to be fair to Dr. Behe, he addresses this issue head on and concludes that the “designer” does design things that are horrible as well (see especially pages 238-239).

Einstein dropped the cosmological constant from his later accounts of relativity. I’d call that a louder admission than any putative “biggest mistake in my life” quotation.

I don't think Behe would ever say that the immune system could not have evolved. Behe's approach seems to say that the evolution of the immune system must have been the result of intelligent design at at least one point along the evolutionary path, perhaps at the very beginning.