Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth
*** (79+ / 122 - )
I am a critic of Dawkins. I wrote a response to The God Delusion ("The Truth Behind the New Atheism"), the essence of which could be summarized by paraphrasing a comment Dawkins makes in this book:
It would be nice if those who oppose evolution (Christianity) would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.
Nevertheless, when I saw this book on the "best-seller" rack in the same store in Dawkins' home town where I bought GD, I thought I'd give him a second chance.
I'm glad I did; this is a much better book. It's well-written, as always. It has awesome photos and lots of humor. Clearly Dawkins is much more in his element talking about life forms than theology, the history of religion, or American culture. Sometimes Dawkins gets carried away with whimsy, sarcasm, or on tangents -- but those are often entertaining, too.
More importantly, Dawkins makes a case for evolution, in a limitted sense, that I think is fairly persuasive. What he establishes is evolution in the sense of, "common descent, over billions of years, from relatively simple life to the myriad creatures." On that, I think his argument should be persuasive to anyone open to being persuaded.
But why does an Oxford zoologist insist on "debating" only the most ignorant opponents? Why does he give us a more than four page transcript of his conversation with a representative from Concerned Women for America, whom he tears to pieces to his evident satisfaction, and never mention any proponent of Intelligent Design?
I was hoping he would. I wanted to read Dawkins' best argument against the most convincing arguments the other side could put up, for the curious reason that I really would like to know if there's anything to ID.
Instead, I found a strange but yawning "gap" in Dawkins' argument.
Dawkins knows who Michael Behe is. He wrote a review of his last book, The Edge of Evolution, for the New York Times. He never mentions him overtly in this book, but he does refer to him, at least twice. On page 128, Dawkins refers to "the 'irreducible complexity' of creationist propaganda." Then again on 132, he writes how "creationists" revile a certain set of experiments, because they show the power of natural selection "undermines their central dogma of irreducible complexity." As Dawkins well knows, "Irreducible complexity" (IC) is the signal idea in Behe's popular Darwin's Black Box, probably the most widely-cited book in the ID arsenal.
These references occur in an interesting context here. You find them in a chapter called "Before Our Own Eyes," about the fact that on occasion, evolution occurs so rapidly that it can be witnessed. More specifically, Dawkins offers these jibes towards the beginning of a seventeen-page long discussion of the biologist Richard Lenski's famous experiments with e-coli.
Dawkins discussion of these experiments is more than a little flabbergasting, giving his implicit claim to have read Edge of Evolution. Behe discussed those experiments in that book, in quite a bit of detail as I recall. Behe also discussed the mutations Dawkins refers to here, in a blog about a year prior to the publication of this book. Dawkins mentions none of that. He says nothing about the probability of particular mutations compared to population size. He doesn't even deal with the physiological detail Behe gave. Reading this, it is hard to believe that he even read chapter 7 of Behe's book, still less his blog on how one "tribe" of e-coli found a way to metabolize citrate. He imagines that these experimental results are a great blow to Behe's concept of IC, completely overlooking the fact that these results are just what Behe predicted! A single instance of a probably double mutation in e coli after trillions of cell divisions, is closely in line with Behe's predictions. Surely someone as literate as Dawkins ought to be able to see this. Behe wrote in his blog a year ago:
In The Edge of Evolution I had argued that the extreme rarity of the development of chloroquine resistance in malaria was likely the result of the need for several mutations to occur before the trait appeared. Even though the evolutionary literature contains discussions of multiple mutations, Darwinian reviewers drew back in horror, acted as if I had blasphemed, and argued desperately that a series of single beneficial mutations certainly could do the trick. Now here we have Richard Lenski affirming that the evolution of some pretty simple cellular features likely requires multiple mutations.
So Behe knows very well that duel mutations can aid in evolution on occasion. How bizarre for Dawkins to treat the same thing here as the death knell of IC!
Dawkins also claims that in Lenski's experiment:
It all happened in a tiny faction of the time evolution normally takes.
Nonsense. 20,000 generations is the equivalent of 400,000 years for human beings. A trillion individuals would be equal to perhaps 20 million years of early human evolution.
Dawkins then talks about how bacteria develop resistance to drugs -- the main subject of Behe's book, but he takes no notice whatsoever of any of the tough details Behe discusses. All we get are glib words of comfort for anyone who might doubt the power of evolution, and an attack on "goons and fools" at some conservative web site led by a lawyer. Dawkins seems to refuse to engage in any but the most childish contrary arguments -- a remarkable act of self-discipline for a scholar.
I'm finding it hard to "place" this guy. There's no doubt he knows a lot about the natural world, and is in love with its wonders. No one can deny that he is a brilliant and evocative writer, that his similes are often moving and suggestive, and that many eminent scientists swear by him. Nor would I deny this book is worth reading.
But Richard Dawkins seems to me less a scholar, and even rhetorical pugalist, than that sort of mythologist, like Freud, Nietzche, or Marx, who cloaks his beliefs in the language but not always the rigor of scientific argument. To the extent he argues, he only seems inclined to take on the easiest possible targets; indeed one gets the feeling both here and in GD that he is talking down to his readers.
Nonetheless, it's not a bad book. Read it for the beautiful descriptions of the natural world, and for its fairly convincing argument for common descent. If you want an argument against ID, the best I have found so far is Michael Shermer's Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design.
27 comments:
Hi David!
I haven't read either book (Behe's or Dawkins new one). From your take on them, it does sound like Dawkins dropped the ball, at least as far as an opportunity to engage readers who have read Behe.
The whole irreducible complexity idea though is muddled and thoroughly debunked. It might be that Dawkins just doesn't want to give Behe the additional exposure. Behe is a crank, judging by his earlier book. There's no need really for Dawkins to namecheck him while making a point, just because Behe discusses the same experiments.
Behe is a crank, judging by his earlier book.
I love how if a typical scientist proposes a controversial theory, they either turn out to be provocative thinkers or cranks depending on how much someone dislikes what they're proposing.
The whole irreducible complexity idea though is muddled and thoroughly debunked.
I'm game - provide some links showing as much. Quick tip: if your debunking is "See, we've discovered that parts of an IC system likely had precursors in earlier generations", you haven't debunked anything.
Actually, let's start with something simple.
Define the "irreducible complexity idea" as you understand it.
Rudy: I think you said you have a scientific background?
I've read off and on about IC, including some attempts to debunk Behe, and his and other responses. In Debating Design, both Behe and Miller have pieces on the subject, including platforming. I haven't seen, so far, that Behe necessarily gets the worst of the argument, still less that he's a "crank." I am, however, open to better arguments against his position, should they come to my attention and I have time to read them. Any recommendation in particular?
David and Crude, I'm sorry it took a while to get back to this blog.
I just checked the first source that came to mind, Cosma Shalizi's blog Three Toed Sloth (he's a statistician) because I thought I remembered a mathematical takedown of Behe there, but it was Dembski instead. Behe's "Black Box" book was quite a while back, and doing a little surfing I was reminded that his knockout example there was flagella, and I think I remember he had some sort of formula for "irreducible complexity" that was a muddle, but that's all I can recall at this point.
I don't think I am being unfair to call him a crank, as that was my opinion of his stuff back when I read it. He didn't seem to know relevant work in complexity theory, to the best of my memory. That's one of the signals of a crank: going into a new area and proclaiming you've made a breakthrough, without actually knowing much.
Which doesn't make him a bad scientist in his specialty, of course. (Kind of like Dawkins and theology. Do the theologians really need to keep abreast of Dawkins' latest opinion in theology?)
You can also turn into a crank just by beating a not very good idea into the ground. This is one way very good scientists can turn into cranks easily: the mathematician Stephen Wolfram recently, say, or Fred Hoyle and "panspermia" back in the day. Susan Sontag said that intelligence is just good taste in ideas.
So, I've gone on a bit, without producing the requested information... ahem. My "scientific" background is math, which some people don't count as science :) but I do know a lot about complexity theory (not really a field on its own, but a mix of ideas from different branches of math), and I'll try to see what I can dig up.
Theologically, theistic ID seems sort of nuts though: why would God set things up so that She had to keep poking at Creation to get even tiny critters to come out right? Poking at us, well, that makes sense!
Behe's "Black Box" book was quite a while back, and doing a little surfing I was reminded that his knockout example there was flagella, and I think I remember he had some sort of formula for "irreducible complexity" that was a muddle, but that's all I can recall at this point.
I am pretty sure you are not accurately recalling Behe on this front. Behe does not have a "formula" for IC, to my knowledge. He has a definition.
That's one of the signals of a crank: going into a new area and proclaiming you've made a breakthrough, without actually knowing much.
I think you're again confusing Behe and Dembski. Dembski talks about complexity theory - Behe talks about IC and the requirements to evolve an IC structure. Behe seems to be working within his field, and Dembski in his, with their respective claims.
Theologically, theistic ID seems sort of nuts though: why would God set things up so that She had to keep poking at Creation to get even tiny critters to come out right? Poking at us, well, that makes sense!
Of course, the ID reply is that your theological objection is out of place: ID doesn't claim, in and of itself, to infer God. It infers the work of an intelligent agent, at most. There is no 'theistic ID'. That's like talking about 'theistic endocrinology'.
Well, I guess I am wrong in recalling a formula.
There *are* coherent measures of what it means to be "irreducibly" complex, for example algorithmic complexity (how long a computer program you need to write to generate the output; pi has an easy formula, so it is not complex in this measure). There are also humanistic, qualitative measures of complexity (Christopher Alexander in design), and engineers in between the two (Herbert Simon's early work); mathematical descriptions of geometric complexity (fractal dimension, etc.)
I don't think that you can Behe is in his field when he makes up a vague definition and "applies" it: a definition is not a theory. Something is not "irreducibly complex" just because we can't quite imagine how it got evolved.
The "intelligent agent" business is a political distinction: if the "intelligent agent" is a natural phenomenon, how did this agent come about, exactly? Who doesn't actually imagine God there? And what does "intelligent" mean? Absent an actual theory of irreducible complexity, positing an "intelligent" agent to supply it, is just empty rhetoric. And what does "intelligent" mean, anyway?
I think that is not easy to specify what an "agent" is either: that is usually a description of an artificial object or a person I'm not aware of *any* usage of "agent" in that sense in the natural sciences. It's usually a social science or engineering term.
There *are* coherent measures of what it means to be "irreducibly" complex, for example algorithmic complexity (how long a computer program you need to write to generate the output; pi has an easy formula, so it is not complex in this measure).
But that's not what Behe is talking about. Again, I think you are confusing what Dembski says with what Behe says. Dembsk is concerned with different issues than Behe.
I don't think that you can Behe is in his field when he makes up a vague definition and "applies" it: a definition is not a theory. Something is not "irreducibly complex" just because we can't quite imagine how it got evolved.
Then it's good Behe never did this.
I asked previously for you to define "irreducible complexity" as you understand that. I think the best way forward here is for you to do exactly this, please.
if the "intelligent agent" is a natural phenomenon, how did this agent come about, exactly? Who doesn't actually imagine God there?
Francis Crick, Nicholas Bostrom, and others in principle. And the question of the nature of the agent and how it came about isn't tackled by ID, intentionally. ID infers intelligence, and that's as far as it goes.
Absent an actual theory of irreducible complexity, positing an "intelligent" agent to supply it, is just empty rhetoric.
Unless known intelligent agents (humans) are demonstrably capable of some things, either uniquely or as-near-as-we-can-tell uniquely, for starters.
And what does "intelligent" mean, anyway?
That's another good question. How does Behe define this in his writings, according to you?
Look, maybe what you should say here is that you've heard bad thins about Behe and thought you'd heard people criticize his claims before, but you've either not read his writings deeply or you've gone and forgot most of what he said, so you have to go back and check up on that. But so far, I don't think you've done a good job of arguing he's either a crank or that his claims have been shown to be empty or fatally flawed.
Well, I wasn't trying very hard to convince you that he was a crank, just giving my impressions; somewhat faded by the years, and explaining what I remembered as being wrong about his argument (vague, not a theory, i.e. doesn't explain anything, and he doesn't seem to know about relevant work.)
I wasn't mixing him up with Dembski there, though I did about the formula, just listing what I thought the heavyweight work was in that intellectual space.
I thought I had said as much (that I read his earlier book but it has been a long time.) Unless it was a book I read as a teen, (it wasn't) I trust the judgements of my somewhat younger self as to the crankiness of Behe, just as I don't feel that I have to revisit Rupert Sheldrake's theories just because I don't remember them in detail. There's no reason in the world why you or David should trust my younger self of course.
A little googling brought back some of why I think the definition so vague: doesn't it run roughly that something is irreducibly complex if it can't be made from simpler but still functional parts? There might be some bells and whistles with that but I think that's the core idea.
The trouble is that there is no way to actually prove the "can't": it's not like a proof in mathematics where you can show something can't happen because the rules are given in advance, like chess. It would take a rather big advance in our understanding of natural systems to get where he wants to go with that idea, and he lacks the natural tools, as I see it, to get there: the tools I listed, like algorithmic complexity, or systems theory (Simon), or dynamical systems, etc.
I don't at all remember what Behe says "intelligence" is. Is it noncircular? I'm interested in that subject for other reasons, so if you think Behe says something original about it I'll check it out. I don't remember anything interesting about it from Black Box, but I might have been inattentive.
You point to humans as intelligent agents, which doesn't at first look like a circular argument. But our only criteria for considering ourselves both intelligent, and agents, appeal to criteria of the human lifeworld, not the natural world. So they are not criteria we can apply to natural phenomena (any more than we can say that micorbiological organisms are musical, or democratic, or like novels. I admit there is a notion of animal intelligence but I think it not the same thing. My dogloving neighbor would disagree though.)
For example I can write a story, but aside from purely physical parts ("he lifed the pen and then put it down") there is no part of that that is describable in scientific terms. (Mabye I would accept that as irreducibly complex but I don't think that is what Behe has in mind.=
A little googling brought back some of why I think the definition so vague: doesn't it run roughly that something is irreducibly complex if it can't be made from simpler but still functional parts? There might be some bells and whistles with that but I think that's the core idea.
No, that's not the IC claim as I know it. In fact you expressly *can* have the IC item made of 'simpler but still functional' parts. It's a question of the function of the IC device having a minimal number of parts and arrangement. After that, it's a question of how likely it is via Darwinian evolution for this arrangement to come about. That's why Behe titled his second book 'The Edge of Evolution': it was about finding the limits of evolution within a given amount of time and resources. A pretty salient question that should be seriously entertained, whether or not someone accepts evolutionary theory.
The trouble is that there is no way to actually prove the "can't": it's not like a proof in mathematics where you can show something can't happen because the rules are given in advance, like chess.
Behe is not trying to "prove the can't" - that's another common misintepretation of his idea. He's not out to prove decisively 'this could never evolve' or even 'this could never evolve by Darwinian methods'. He's pointing out that given our current understandings of evolutionary theory, particularly Darwinian/Neo-Darwinian theory, the evolution of some things is extremely unlikely - so much so that it doesn't seem right to expect it. The second part is the inference to intelligence.
He entirely allows for this inference to be overturned in the future. That's part of science.
You point to humans as intelligent agents, which doesn't at first look like a circular argument. But our only criteria for considering ourselves both intelligent, and agents, appeal to criteria of the human lifeworld, not the natural world.
It appeals to the natural world precisely because of the contrast that we've seen thus far.
Are you saying that the definition of IC is relative to whether a (biological) device could likely come about by evolution? That's circular: one should have a principle that tells us when a system is IC, independent of one's judgement of whether we know how it came about.
If a purported instance of IC is eventually explained conventionally, then it suddenly doesn't become an instance of IC? That seems open to the criticism that there is no real theory to IC: just goalpost moving.
That is, the logic sounds like this: --This biological system is irreducibly complex! --No it isn't, here's how it came about. --Ah, well that's science then! It wasn't really IC! But look at this over here, this must be IC! (Repeat again.)
I don't see how what you said about the definition IC conflicts with what I said. I guess I'll have to go to the primary source and check it out.
On the philosophical issue of intelligence, agency (intentionality?) and so on: these are deep waters. We may not really disagree here: all I was saying was that our only known model for an intelligent agent in the natural world was the human being, and that the characteristics of being intelligent and having agenthood are not well-specified enough to actually form part of a scientific theory, at least so far, outside of the actual human sciences (where we use our tacit knowledge of what these words mean.)
In other words Behe is an animist, only his animism is on the microscopic level, instead of at the level of thunder, etc. it's at the level of chemical reactions.
@Crude,
Looking over my post, I see that my remarks were aimed entirely at Behe's IC idea, and not at his idea of the limits of evolution (time and space considerations.) These do seem perfectly scientific, and open to refutation in the normal fashion. They should give pause though, in their resemblance to the 19th century arguments about whether there was enough time for mountains to arise, etc., or whether the sun could have been burning long enough to agree with the dating of the fossil record. Even if there is a puzzle, it's more parsimonious to assume we don't have all the physics or biology yet, rather than invoke an "intelligent agent" to intervene (God, in the 19th century).
I see Behe's Edge of Evolution as very necessary scientific work, attempting to answer an obvious question. If all he were saying were, "These are the limits of what NDE as we know it can accomplish, perhaps there is some other mechanism," and even if he proved wrong, if his name weren't "Behe," I doubt his critics would find so many reasons to fuss and nit-pick over it.
Theologically, I asked him why God would do a miracle to make HIV or malaria work better. His answer was, in one sense, reassuringly lame and tentative: it reminded me that he really doesn't approach these issues as a theologian, but as a scientist.
@David, what did he say?
Rudy: You can find the whole interview here:
http://christthetao.homestead.com/interviews.html
My Pdf isn't installed on this computer yet, so I can't look it up right now.
Rudy,
Are you saying that the definition of IC is relative to whether a (biological) device could likely come about by evolution?
No. I'm saying that once an IC structure has been plausibly identified, Behe proceeds to analyze the likelihood that such a thing would or could have come about by known evolutionary processes.
If a purported instance of IC is eventually explained conventionally, then it suddenly doesn't become an instance of IC?
Nope.
In other words Behe is an animist, only his animism is on the microscopic level, instead of at the level of thunder, etc. it's at the level of chemical reactions.
The way you're an animist on the level of cars, computers and furniture?
Even if there is a puzzle, it's more parsimonious to assume we don't have all the physics or biology yet, rather than invoke an "intelligent agent" to intervene (God, in the 19th century).
What Behe does is tentatively infer intelligence, while recognizing that this can be overturned in the future. Again, Behe does not do this blindly ('Nothing could have made IC structures, therefore it was God!') but with some considerable evidence ('Known processes are dramatically unlikely to result in IC structures. Intelligent agents make them all the time. Therefore, we can infer intelligence here tentatively.")
@Crude, you are saying there *is* a way to identify something as IC, independently of its plausibly evolving by selection (in a reasonable time frame), since you suggest the probability calculation comes after.
Can two people ever agree on what an IC process or structure is? You suggest something can in fact evolve in a short time frame yet be IC. Do you know what example Behe gives for this case? "Irreducible" has to be doing some work here that "complex" doesn't do by itself, since nearly every biological process is complex, but what is it?
It's perfectly OK to be animist about artificial objects, by my general philosophical remarks, since they are in fact part of our (Heidegger-style) lifeworld. As natural objects (lumps of metal) they have no function or meaning at all. We recognize ancient potshards as parts of pots, because we already have and know about pots. (This gets tricky with stone tools, from what I've read, and a lot of experience is required to recognize them at some sites.)
An object might be found that was truly alien, not fitting into natural laws as we know them, but we would have no way to know it was intelligently designed, rather than simply a product of some unknown but unthinking process, because we would not know what it "meant".
I'm actually not entirely convinced that an alien coming to earth would recognize cars as "irreducibly complex" or even made by an "intelligence", since they would have no meaning in its lifeworld. (Think of how eerily "artificial" some mathematical fractals look, despite not being designed at all; our alien might just take the attitude that some natural fractal process made these filigreed 4 wheeled objects of metal and hydrocarbons.
Or humans might just be seen as a part of a natural (locally entropy reducing) process, the way water filtering into a cave makes stalactites. (By the same token, we would have trouble recognizing actual alien sapients, which might be why we haven't found them yet... I am not a big fan of CS Lewis, but at least one of his alien worlds is way more alien than most SF writers manage, and his idea of space as filled with angels is as bizarre as anything in Borges.)
This is a tricky argument, and I don't expect to convince you of it since it's an idea I'm working on, and only half-baked. I was pursuing the idea on another board of whether an alien visiting earth would be able, by scientific means, to verify the existence of the novel "Pride and Prejudice" (as opposed to strange lumps of cellulose.) My answer was no, along the lines of the argument above.
Rudy,
@Crude, you are saying there *is* a way to identify something as IC, independently of its plausibly evolving by selection (in a reasonable time frame), since you suggest the probability calculation comes after.
Can two people ever agree on what an IC process or structure is? You suggest something can in fact evolve in a short time frame yet be IC. Do you know what example Behe gives for this case? "Irreducible" has to be doing some work here that "complex" doesn't do by itself, since nearly every biological process is complex, but what is it?
That's a lot of questions, but here's the problem: Behe answers these questions pretty explicitly in his books and writings. If you simply have no idea what the heck Behe's even talking about, that's okay - but in that case, please don't talk about how he's a crank and has been refuted.
It's perfectly OK to be animist about artificial objects,
Great. How do you tell what objects are artificial or not? In principle, 'artificial' objects are the only ones we've ever encountered.
I'm actually not entirely convinced that an alien coming to earth would recognize cars as "irreducibly complex" or even made by an "intelligence", since they would have no meaning in its lifeworld.
Why would they have to, for the purposes of ID? The question is whether they plausibly could infer intelligence in principle, and if so, how.
I was pursuing the idea on another board of whether an alien visiting earth would be able, by scientific means, to verify the existence of the novel "Pride and Prejudice" (as opposed to strange lumps of cellulose.) My answer was no, along the lines of the argument above.
If you want to pursue the line of thought that science is completely incapable, as science, of determining what is and is not the product of design, go for it. The price for that is the following: any and all claims that science has "shown" that such and such "was not designed, but evolved" die on the spot. It turns out science has never posed a threat to the claim that the universe or anything in it is, in fact, designed - because science is completely incapable of ruling on the question in either direction. To insist otherwise is an abuse of science.
Really, all I can suggest at this point is: Read Behe's books if you really care to know what he thinks. Do not read takedowns of Behe, do not read criticisms of Behe, until after you actually read his books, because far and away most of the time his claims are misrepresented - and it's pretty clear that you just aren't aware of what he's actually saying.
@Crude, as I said before, I think, I did read "D's Black Box" when it came out, and found it cranky. For your sake, I'll get it tomorrow at the library (I'm going anyway, so it's not a problem) and review what he says there so I can see if I still have that impression; and also so I can answer you more specifically (and also because you seem reluctant for whatever reason to supply the information about Behe's arguments that I asked for.)
I'm not sure why I shouldn't say that he's been refuted; it's hardly up to me to decide whether he's been refuted; the scientific community has considered his arguments and found them wanting; that's pretty much what being refuted means there. If someone asks me about cold fusion, I'll tell them it was refuted, without a thought to myself "but I'd better go back and reread all the science news from 20 years ago to be really sure.") But I'll do it since you asked me to.
As far as the rest of the post, about whether science can determine what is or is not an artifact: you understood me up to a point. It is in fact a consequence of what I said that science cannot determine what is or is not an artifact. People *can* recognize human artifacts, but not by using science (science as technique, for example carbon dating, etc. is fine, just the way we might need a magnifying glass to read a book, but we are not doing optics but reading.)
Think about my example of Pride and Prejudice: I can point it out to you and say "Here's a book I like" (um, I actually haven't read it, though I've seen the Bollywood version. Anyway..) I'm not doing science when I do that, you are not doing science when you look at it and see that it is a book (and recognize it as an embodiment of an abstract, non-material, artificial object, the novel "Pride and Prejudice".)
We can understand the chain of cause and effect in a biological process; we don't have to decide whether or not it is artificial, because it is not manmade and doesn't come with human meanings attached.
Can we tell that it evolved? Sure. Does that mean science has "proved" it's not designed? No, it just doesn't make sense to ask whether it was designed or not, since it is not manmade, and so the question isn't (according to my argument) decidable. It's like asking science to decide whether something is beautiful or not; outside of our "lifeworld" the question just isn't meaningful. (I'm not sure whether it is silly to talk about God's lifeworld :) but She presumably has a bigger idea of what beauty is than we do...and design too.)
Rudy,
@Crude, as I said before, I think, I did read "D's Black Box" when it came out, and found it cranky.
Behe wrote two relevant books here: Darwin's Black Box, and The Edge of Evolution.
My problem wasn't you saying "you found it cranky" necessarily. You opened your comments in this thread with the claim "The whole irreducible complexity idea though is muddled and thoroughly debunked." and that Behe is a crank. That's pretty strong stuff. I think it's fair to ask that to be demonstrated.
I'm not sure why I shouldn't say that he's been refuted; it's hardly up to me to decide whether he's been refuted; the scientific community has considered his arguments and found them wanting; that's pretty much what being refuted means there.
First of all: no, that's not what refuted means. Maybe you mean to say "if I get the impression that most scientists don't think an idea is worth taking seriously, I follow their lead" - but that's simply not "refuted".
Second, your standard is pretty bad. It would mean that a variety of scientific views that are now popular were, in the past, refuted - including evolutionary theory itself. All it would take is a consensus of scientists at one point to regard a view as wrong and voila - we have a variety of refuted ideas that are now recognized as true. So again, your use of 'refutation' here is deeply flawed.
Can we tell that it evolved? Sure. Does that mean science has "proved" it's not designed? No, it just doesn't make sense to ask whether it was designed or not, since it is not manmade, and so the question isn't (according to my argument) decidable.
The question is not decidable, according to science. Outside of science, the question may be decidable (or are you going to say you have no idea whether the monitor in front of you is an artifact?)
But if that's the case, then anyone who believes that science shows the universe, in whole or in part, is not designed... is wrong. We can't even tell if these things are "natural" or "artificial" - indeed, there may be nothing "natural" in the entire observable universe, as far as science can tell.
And those scientists who think their theories proceed on the assumption that they are studying nature, not artifacts? They're wrong. Or, I guess, refuted.
Your point about refutation is well taken; though my opinions about Behe will hardly count as a refutation either...
Now, as far as your refutation of me :) , sure, outside of science, there are ways to decide whether something has been designed. Find out its history: if a person made it, it was designed. Imagine I go outside, and see a stick on a rock (there are lots of both in my backyard). I assume that it just got that way "naturally", from a branch fall. My neighborhood sees me looking at it, and tells me "Your son was using that stick as a lever, and the rock as a fulcrum, to pry up a rock from the ground". Suddenly the stick is recognized as an artifact (assuming the neighbor is telling me the truth).
Does the physical nature of the stick suddenly change? Well, no. There's no way looking at it that I could tell that it was used as a simple machine.
What about the scientists who might be studying artifacts? You are again having me say that everything *could* be an artifact, when I am saying that only human made things are artifacts; pretty much the opposite of that; it's harder to be an artifact in my argument; or rather, it's impossible to be an artifact, from a simply materialistic point of view. Recall our alien who thinks of our cars as natural fractal objects, produced by other weird but natural fractal objects (us; we are in fact way more fractal inside than most of our artifacts; I'm fudging a bit with the car.)
As far as what the scientists should do with my argument, well, they can go on with their work. They are mostly interested in studying non human made objects, and it's clear which ones those are (ones without a human history).
Now, as far as your refutation of me :) , sure, outside of science, there are ways to decide whether something has been designed.
And ID proponents offer up one more way to infer design. Even if you call it "not science".
What about the scientists who might be studying artifacts? You are again having me say that everything *could* be an artifact, when I am saying that only human made things are artifacts
This is a muddle. If you want to define "artifact" to mean "anything a human made", I'm just going to ask what you'd call "something made by an intelligent agent who is not a human" - and then, in principle, absolutely everything can be that.
If you want to avoid ID by denying the existence of any artifacts at all (and therefore there's nothing for ID to infer regarding), you're welcome to it. I think most ID proponents would be delighted at that move, in fact. It's rhetorical suicide.
@Crude, you seem to getting frustrated with my philosophical argument, and as I said, these are ideas that are half-baked; and I'm trying them out here. If you don't want me to continue with this part of our discussion, that's OK. Let me make a final point about them, then I'll come back to the thread later (probably tonight) after I've had a chance to look at Behe's old book (I don't think our library has the new one yet) again and can comment on his ideas specifically.
I am *denying* the possibility of scientifically determining that an object is "something made by an intelligent agent that is not human"; specifically because both the notion of "intelligent" and the notion of "agent" are only meaningful in our human lifeworld. If we ever meet, shall I say, "highly evolved" aliens (I'm trying to avoid "intelligent" here, because we don't know what that means for aliens), we will have to interact with them for quite a while to develop a new "lifeworld" that includes them, and whatever this interaction produces might make it possible for us to (nonscientifically) recognize their "artifacts" (though ahead of the event, I have no way of knowing what that recognition would possibly look like.)
My argument has some remote connection to the problem of consciousness: if we met aliens, would we know they were conscious? Would their UFOs be "designed" if they were produced like a nautilus produces its shell? (Unconsciously, as it were?)
I'm not sure if you think I'm making this argument primarily against IDism; in fact I started this line of thinking as an attack on materialism and naturalism; I didn't think of it's application to ID until this thread.
It's half-baked for sure, and it's quite possible that I could be convinced by Behe (or by another writer on complexity theory, say, or an argument from the universality of mathematics, etc.) that there are principled ways to determine that something is not evolved, but designed, independent of the kind of "lifeworld participation" I'm claiming is necessary.
I do wish you would comment on my examples, though. If I'm going to go get Behe and work on him, it's only fair for you to give me a little more feedback on my argument, more than just saying it's a muddle... but how BAD a muddle :) ? Specifically, does the "Pride and Prejudice" example have any traction, do you think? What do you make of it? Think of it as an argument against materialism instead of in the ID context.
Rudy,
I'm not getting frustrated with the argument. I think what I've said about Behe stands (and I don't even think ID is science), so I'll focus on your idea.
A few suggestions.
* Drop 'lifeworld'. It sounds like hokey New Age nonsense. Even if you have a better definition for it than that, it's exactly how it sounds, and it's going to predispose most people towards thinking the idea is nonsense from the get-go.
* If I understand your goal right, your best bet is to argue that 'intelligent agent' is simultaneously A) both an obvious and meaningful term to humans, and B) utterly intractable to science, certainly science as it stands. In that sense you'd be getting into a demarcation argument, redrawing the lines of where science ends and other modes of consideration begin. This would take some more work, but it's a productive approach.
* Part of the problem with your response is that humans already design things using evolution and 'unconscious processes' (forgetting for a moment how problematic that claim itself is.) We use artificial selection. We use constrained variation. (See the by-now old example of using evolutionary principles to design an antenna.) This is again a place where people trip up against Behe, because Behe says expressly that it's possible for something to be both 'designed' yet evolve - it's simply that, in that case, you're no longer in the realm of darwinian natural selection. (A lot of people forget, or are unaware of the fact that Behe accepts common descent. That alone should tip his hand.)
* I'm not sure what you're saying qualifies as an argument against materialism necessarily, since there are materialists who will bite the bullet and start denying minds exist. (Granted, they're regarded as pretty damn crazy and mainstream materialists and atheists like to ignore them, because there's no way to talk about EM and maintain the whole 'but if you reject materialism you're irrational on the spot' line.) As I said, I think your argument would be better situated as an argument about the limits of science.
@Crude, thanks for the very useful and thoughtful criticism.
1. "Lifeworld" is not my coinage, it's a standard term in continental philosophy (going back to Husserl and Heidegger). But yes, if someone doesn't use that jargon, it sounds hokey. I'll have to consider how to reword that.
2. Yes, I am definitely after that; so I'll think about that science/nonscience angle more.
3. I'll have to think about the evolved/not evolved issue. That's looks tough to handle. Yes, I knew about the antennas, and genetic programming (and of course, fancy pigeons). I'm not sure what you mean by unconscious processes here: would that be incremental, non-deliberate selection over generations, like domestication of wild animals?
4. Since my argument started as an argument against materialism, I'm reluctant to let go of that part, though I'm probably not technically competent enough in philosophy to actually get far with it. I'm sure that EM'ists would be happy to think of "Pride and Prejudice" as some sort of observable mass behavior; I went through a phase after reading Walden Two as an undergrad of trying to see everything through behaviorist glasses.
I suspect (especially given the metric tons of continental philosophy out there, not to mention all the rest) that not only is my idea not original, but that some day I'll see a tiny footnote somewhere solidly refuting it. Oh well. I'll keep at it though.
I wasn't able to get to the library today to get Behe, unfortunately, but I promise to do it as soon as I can. Thanks again for taking the time to think about my idea.
Rudy,
Re: lifeworld, my mistake then. I'm not familiar with it, and I don't know that philosophy very much. I just know when I hear lifeworld I have an instinctively poor reaction - sounds too airy. That's pure aesthetics.
Regarding unconscious processes, it depends on what you mean. I don't need my computer to be conscious (as far as I know anyway) for the programs I code within it to run properly. That starts a serious of 'unconscious processes' that are nevertheless designed. With evolution, I'm skeptical that anyone is capable of telling, certainly where God is concerned, what is and isn't deliberate and non-deliberate selection. (This is where one common response is 'well we don't need deliberation so occam's razor', but that just seems like such crap - we don't need unguided processes either, and unlike guided process, those are and will forever remain purely speculative.)
I don't think you're in as bad shape as you think, since you're seemingly not trying to refute materialism, but making a demarcation argument. There's plenty of room to tussle there. If you haven't read it, I suggest reading Bas Van Fraassen's "Science, materialism and false consciousness" paper for some interesting insights.
Behe also has a now-and-then updated blog at http://behe.uncommondescent.com/ where he goes into his ideas in greater detail now and then - comments free, though I've emailed him before and he was an extremely amiable guy.
@Crude, thanks for the link to Behe, I'll google for the other paper you suggested.
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