Michael Behe, ID, and "intellectual dishonesty"

By apologia on February 15th, 2008 at 08:52pm (

)

In a blog here late last year, it was floated that Michael Behe can't be trusted because he lied under oath (Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board). Since I have little connection with seeking ID taught in schools, I kind of let it drop there, doing little more than asking the commenter for more details and getting none.

But recently, I picked Behe's 10 year anniversary reprint of "Darwin's Black Box" back up and started the process of a reread. I became curious enough to Google "Michael Behe Lied Under Oath", and boy, did I get an eyeful of responses. It seems that the staunch evolutionists out there have had a field day with that one. Apparently, they still are (see http://www.otmatheist.com/2007/12/20/merry-kitz-mas/).

I'll be quoting from the above link-- even quoting quotes... :)

Siamang (the author of the blog I'm quoting) started with the following quotes from Judge Jones:

**** “Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions,” Jones wrote. “The inescapable truth is that both [Alan] Bonsell and [William] Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions. … Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner. … Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony.”

…

“The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

…

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial.”

Then, immediately follows with the editorial statement:

With those words in mind, especially those speaking to the intellectual honesty of the Intelligent Design proponents… I want to talk about one particularly dramatic part of the trial.

Michael Behe is on the stand...

Now, I'm not sure if the author intentionally misled his readers, or if it was merely an unfortunate turn of the keystroke, but it's as if (s)he seeks to tie Behe into the "Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions..." comment. I had to go elsewhere to find actual context and see that the accusation is directed toward the members of the school board, and not the expert witnesses.

So, where was the blatant false witness that Behe is accused of by the naturalist camp? Well... In response to questions about the peer review of "Darwin's Black Box", Behe claims that it was peer reviewed, perhaps even more so than most scientific works.

**** Furthermore, the book was sent out to more scientists than typically review a manuscript. In the typical case, a manuscript that’s going to — that is submitted for a publication in a scientific journal is reviewed just by two reviewers. My book was sent out to five reviewers.

Furthermore, they read it more carefully than most scientists read typical manuscripts that they get to review because they realized that this was a controversial topic. So I think, in fact, my book received much more scrutiny and much more review before publication than the great majority of scientific journal articles.

Siamang's blog then quotes 4 of the 5 peers that reviewed the work and points out that one tentatively endorsed it, three didn't agree with its points and thus rejected it, and the fifth hasn't commented.

So, I ask again... Where is the lie? Behe claimed to have had 5 peer reviews. There were apparently 5 peer reviews. So, I'm confused. Does "peer review" mean that everyone must glowingly praise the work and agree with the findings? Is that what science has become in the post-Darwinian era? (If so, how has the peer review process changed so much from the time a book called "...Origin of Species" was published by a non-scientist theologian whose views flew in the face of the current scientific paradigm?) Seriously, I'm confused. I'm finding a bit of "intellectual dishonesty" here, but not from Behe.

Siamang ends his piece with:

But now we get to the part where something hasn’t changed in the two years since Judge Jones talked about the lies and the duplicity of the ID advocates. Two years after one of Behe’s peer-reviewers revealed that the review was a phone call, and another reviewer called it “the philosophical wanderings of an uniformed (or disingenuous) mind.”

What hasn’t changed?

The Discovery Institute’s website, two years later, still lists Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” as a peer-reviewed book.

I guess some things never change.

(Note that the author again seeks to wrongly imply that Behe and the ID expert witnesses were accused of false witness by the judge.)

Um... It was peer reviewed at the time. How else would the quoted reviewer have had such a strong opinion if he had not reviewed it and read it as carefully as Behe claimed? Furthermore, the book has been dissected and carved on for years, so much so that the 10 year anniversary edition has a new appendix just responding to the attempted refutations by his peers.

Too see some of his responses to some of his peer review, go here.

So, I submit that if there is ANY intellectual dishonesty going on, it is done by those filling the internet with rumors and accusations against Behe's character. Like I said, Behe has updated his book to answer his critics. Perhaps those critics would better spend their time tackling the science and not the scientist.

Next, I think I'll blog on Behe's correspondence with science journals while trying to get published-- he has an exchange posted on arn.org. It's pretty eye-opening, actually. Then, I'll be blogging on some points made by Judge Jones in his ruling on Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board that I found (incredible?) interesting.

Until then...

Be blessed.

(Note: **** indicates that I am quoting a quote from the blog. The first is quoting Judge Jones, the second is quoting Behe.)

It doesn't seem like we're getting anywhere, does it?

Submitted by e-dogg (not verified) on Sun, 03/02/2008 - 15:03.

I stay a bit confused by it when you jump between the statements that ID is both non-falsifiable and falsified.

Specific claims of ID (which are actually just negative arguments against evolution) have been falsified. The central tenet of ID (that life has been designed by an intelligent agent) is unfalsifiable.

* Natural selection gave us the vastly differing forms of life we find on Earth today.

That's a pretty broad item, but it can surely be falsified. If natural selection is shown to not cause the small changes in organisms over time that we can observe, then it's falsified. If the envisioned micro/macro-evolutionary boundary (whatever that is) is shown to exist, that would do it. If spontaneous generation of complex organisms is observed...

* Evolution happened by a process that was unguided, blind, and had no result in mind.

Easy, just show evidence of a guiding force that influences the mechanisms of evolution.

* The fossil record would match neo-Darwinian expectations. It is incomplete due to many potential reasons-- none of which can be tested.

Yet this could be easily falsified by finding, say, a bird older than the first fish, or a mammal older than amphibians. Sure, the record is incomplete, but what we do have matches up quite well.

* Similarity means kinship, and thus if we find similarity in the fossil record, that means "transitional fossils".

This could be falsified by looking at living animals today that achieve the same level similarity. If genetic analysis rules out kinship, this one's falsified.

We won't even get into the fact that the entire theory is untestable as implemented and treated-- in that it is considered scientific truth with no need to test it.

The reason for that treatment is that it has already passed over 100 years of testing. That doesn't mean it can't still be tested, just that no one is wasting valuable research time on questions that have already been answered.

Give us some detail, and please make it detail that accounts for the huge gaps that have to be overcome simultaneously. Like, the addition of working clotting and unclotting enzymes at the same time, so that you don't kill the organism with clotted blood in the system that can't unclot, or unclotted blood that makes the organism bleed to death.

An understanding of the development of the clotting system reveals that your silmultaneous requirement isn't required at all. That happens when you start with a current complex system and try to work backward (as Behe does). If you start from the beginning, you see that the primitive clotting system would have developed in an animal with low blood pressure and minimal blood flow. The clotting triggers would be much less sensitive than what we have, and therefore the clotting ability wouldn't be strong enough to endanger the animal, but would still confer an advantage.

As the clotting triggers got stronger, then selective pressure for a clot-dissolving system would increase. The end result is a system where both are required, but the strength of the clotting cascade would never have progressed without the development of the complementary system.

Again, I'm confused, because you seem to chide Behe for "waving off" acceptable responses while also claiming that acceptable responses are impossible to give.

Your use of the word "acceptable" is confusing here. The responses he ignores are "acceptable" to the just about everyone in the scientific community. Behe's version of "acceptable" is unreasonable. Scientists have provided *possible* pathways for the evolution of his IC systems, based on genetic data, chemical similarities, etc. He will accept nothing less than the ACTUAL pathway, it seems.

It's funny that you so often accuse me of making irrelevant analogies. So, now it's OK for me to use the design analogy for biological output?

I'm not sure I understand your response here. My analogy was purely about what level of evidence is acceptable. We don't know exactly how the clotting cascade progressed, just as we don't know exactly who put the Parthenon together. However, we do have evidence that makes us reasonbly certain that evolutionary processes explain the development of the clotting system, just as we're reasonably certain that the Greeks constructed the Parthenon.

You've said that my use of [chance] in discussion is "ID boilerplate". Either it is or isn't.

Your characterization of evolution as a purely "chance" process is incomplete and misleading, and a common Creationist tactic. Chance plays a part, to be sure, but there's far more to it.

I'm saying chance and design are the two known causes in play. Feel free to propose another. Note that without a designer, even natural "law" and order inevitably fall back to chance. But again, feel free to propose another cause in play.

You're expanding the playing field again, trying to make this a "worldview" discussion. The chance in evolution is very strictly confined. When you drag in the source of natural laws, you've crossed over into religion.

I think this is why Jones called this a "contrived" dualism. The chance in evolution is limited to certain processes. Design could be another explanation for the results, but so could other things, like necessity or proximity.

I think you're reading a lot into my reasons for distrusting neo-Darwinism. I can honestly say that it has little to do with religious preferences.

And yet you are fond of citing the "worldview" leanings of scientists to explain their views?

Design is apparent. Neo-Darwinian evolution is full of "just-so" explanations-- many explaining away a lack of evidence that should be there if it is true, evidences that the founder claimed would turn up if true, and evidences that the founders claimed would greatly harm the theory if they didn't turn up. Much of the evidence used FOR it has been proven fraudulent, thus damaging the credibility of many in the community-- especially considering that a lot of the fraudulent evidence has been circulated and used (even in textbooks) since being shown incorrect and/or fraudulent.

Wow, that's quite the laundry list of Creationist claims you've got there. I like the use of "many", "much", "a lot" to describe isolated cases that the scientific community, itself, discovered and corrected as part of the normal processes that brought us our current understanding.

It hasn't made its case strong enough to overturn what is "apparent".

So a gut feeling that something is "apparent" is stronger evidence to you than the mountains of diverse data accumulated to date? If so, then we may never be able to reconcile our definitions of science.

Further, it can't explain the ultimate causes, such as life's existence in the first place.

It was never intended to do that. Would you throw out a recipe for meat loaf that doesn't explain how to get a package of ground beef? Why must you constantly move those goalposts?

I'm not surprised that we;re not...

Submitted by apologia on Sun, 03/02/2008 - 18:24.

Yo...

Let me first thank you again for taking the pains and effort to give your time and input here. Never think that it isn't appreciated.

Also, I wanted to let you know that I'm only responding here to the points you've made that aren't covered in the "out of order..." thread of comments. I just don't want to get spread too thin or repetitive.

Maybe some claims have been falsified, but the bulk of them are still in play and defended well. Many neo-Darwinian claims have been falsified, but many are defended well from within its paradigm.

You have admitted several times that positive evidence has been offered.

The tautology of natural selection as the process that gave us the vast array of life is unfalsifiable.

I think we all agree that natural selection is a process capable of change within a kind, so your criteria still has neo-Darwinism's claim as unfalsifiable. The claim is that natural selection is capable of producing the vast array of life we find on earth. Please stay true to the points in contest.

You have admitted on this site already that the proposed process of macro-evolution works too slowly to be observed, thus is neither provable or disprovable.

For your last point, the best we can do is the Cambrian explosion in the fossil record, which is sudden appearance followed by stasis. Yet, it somehow proves neo-Darwinian claims?

Easy, just show evidence of a guiding force that influences the mechanisms of evolution.

After stating:

The central tenet of ID (that life has been designed by an intelligent agent) is unfalsifiable.

What was your word? "Rich."

Yet this could be easily falsified by finding, say, a bird older than the first fish, or a mammal older than amphibians. Sure, the record is incomplete, but what we do have matches up quite well.

Archaeopterix is a proposed reptile-bird transition that follows birds in the fossil record. There are cother instances of the fossil record being out of order, and they are explained away by appealing to rock movement, tectonics, etc... Since fossil order hasn't yet been effective as proof or refutation, I won't hold my breath for it to start.

Um... You may want to reread even within the neo-Darwinian circles as to how well the record matches up. It actually matches worse now than it did for Darwin. Come to think of it, it was right here on this site that you all but admitted this and gave me explanations about why it doesn't.

...

Now, this is another place where your answer convinces me that you haven't actually read Behe on Behe, because he stands pretty hard on all of this argumentation.

You started with a twin-engine to explain the evolution of a space shuttle. Blood pressure etc aside, you still have a complex system that would have to have evolved into place. It would have to have evolved dependent structures in the system such as clotting and thinning simultaneously without killing the organism. And per natural selection, it would have needed to be simultaneous to be a selective superior "fittest", otherwise it was expending energy that others weren't just to produce useless and probably dangerous partial system. You almost seemed to realize this when you said:

"As the clotting triggers got stronger, then selective pressure for a clot-dissolving system would increase."

But then you drew short again. Even with low blood pressure, thinned blood is a detriment, and at the very least not a selective improvement, else the clotter wouldn't have been a selective improvement. Clotted blood without the unclotter is definitely not an improvement, even with low blood pressure.

This is only a couple of the problems with the offered response that Behe dissects, and I would genuinely recommend that you revisit Behe's responses to his critic. (And I haven't even brought up that we can't assume that the "primitive" system evolved into the modern. Even Dawkins states that we can't do that. and he proposes that the eye and other complex systems probably had to evolve several times over in different ways and through different channels.)

I beg to differ. If the responses ignore the actual points he makes, then they are not refutations. They are appeal to authority. Scientists have offered potential pathways that fail to get around Behe's assertions, just as you did. You (and they) still have not provided a way to turn the biplane into a space shuttle one bolt at a time while remaining in flight and outperforming all of the other biplanes.

And yet you are fond of citing the "worldview" leanings of scientists to explain their views?

Actually, that fair enough. I'll take that criticism. But also note that I am claiming equal ground between neo-Darwinism and ID for qualification as science. I'm not sure you can fault me for a "good for the goose" argument.

Piltdown man, Nebraska man (complete with full iullustration based pig bones) Haekel's embyology, Archaeoraptor Liaoningensis, peppered moths, to name but a few... And your defense that the scientific community found and exposed them is a little unsatisfying with the knowledge that most of them are still printed in textbooks to prove evolution.

And now you break out the Darwinian words like "mountains of evidence". That's mountains of evidence interpreted within a paradigm that you have admitted here doesn't need to be questioned. The majority of the evidence is supportive of small change within a kind, as you've admitted yourself to macroevolution is basically unobservable due to time involved. All of the evidence can be interpreted within the competing paradigms. You leave out the evidence that calls it into question, and reinterpret it with "just-so" stories as to why it doesn't (see the fossil record and cambrian explosion as one example). And most of the argument against ID that you seem to use boils down to an appeal to authority.

I guess we aren't getting far at all...

Faith Well Grounded