Astrology, Here We Come!

Abola Lapite notes that "intelligent design's" defenders regard themselves as peers of astrology:

Foreign Dispatches: Astrology, Intelligent Design and Other Sciences: Take a look at this revealing courtroom admission by Michael Behe, Lehigh University biochemist and Intelligent Design proponent.

Astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same criteria used by a well-known advocate of Intelligent Design to justify his claim that ID is science, a landmark US trial heard on Tuesday.

Under cross examination, ID proponent Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, admitted his definition of %u201Ctheory%u201D was so broad it would also include astrology.One wonders what exactly wouldn't fall under the label "theory" under Behe's definition. Phrenology? Phlogiston? Invisible pink unicorns on Saturn? How about intelligent falling?

The Discovery Institute people must be kicking themselves tonight on hearing of Behe's admission, but I'll give the man this much - at least he's honest, even if being under oath in a court of law does constrain one's scope for dishonesty somewhat.

Comments

[rps]

That's an insult to astrology, phrenology, and phlogiston theory. At least those are falsifiable.

[Oren]

I doubt this "admission" will do the IDers much harm where they really care, which is in the public's opinion. I'm pretty sure I've seen surveys (can't provide a cite) showing that a majority think astrology is for real.

[ogmb]

This article is doing an injustice to the phlogiston theory of fire.

[Joe S.]

I used to be a natural scientist, and worked with Mike Behe at the NIH in the early 1980's. He wasn't the brightest bulb in the building--although to be fair, Building 2 had some mighty bright bulbs. But he was indeed an honest guy; good folks.

Intelligent design is a dishonest movement. But, as far as I can tell, Mike concentrates on "irreducible complexity," which is not inherently dishonest. Basically, what the irreducible complexity people are doing is exploring the maximins between two evolutionary states. If the maximin seems too high, there are only two possible conclusions: 1) there was no plausible evolutionary path between the states, or 2) you haven't looked hard enough for the saddle point. Behe, unfortunately, ignores a lot of history and does not view #2 as the more likely hypothesis. But looking for the saddle point can be a very productive research program.

[Tom]

Isn't phlogiston just (absence of) oxygen without a knowledge of its (non-) materiality?

[CCCB]

Irreducible Complexity is essentially the old fallacy of "Arguement for Ignorance" with a fancy name.

Because Behe can't SEE how something evolved it must be irreducibly Complex. Many of his examples, like the flagellum have been proven false but Behe continues to expound this notion of IC. Behe might be an honest guy sometimes but it's obvious that he lets his religious beliefs overpower his reasoning facilities and has thrown away his career as a real biologist as a result.

Also I don't think most people will be put off with ID being on par with Astrology. A large number of people either think it's real or confuse it with astronomy.

[slamra]

Aren't there astrologists with lawyers out there who can now intervene in the lawsuit and demand that astrology also be taught in the public schools?

[piotr]

Irreducible complexity was falsified on almost every example that was given. In any case, it is an extremally slippery argument. I have empirically checked that the fact that I cannot solve a puzzle can co-exists with a surprisingly simple solution. I also empirically checked that I am not that bad in solving puzzles from my area of research -- meaning that on occasion I was the person finding a simple solution overlooked by REALLY smart people.

Irreducible complexity seems similar to what computer scientists call Kolmogorov complexity. The latter is an OK method for finding so-called non-constructive proofs that something exists, but in general an estimating statement about Kolmogorov complexity of a particular object is undecidable.

It is also undecidable in a manner that is very relevant to biology. You can have a candidate for a short description of an object, but you cannot tell if it describes that object, because the description says: start this process like that, wait, and when it ends you will get the object I am describing. So yes, you can start the process, but you cannot tell when you should give up waiting (in case the candidate is not a valid descripion).

Of course, if this is a "real life description", we have an idea how long to wait. However, bacteria had several billion years to evolve before they started doing anything non-bacterial, so the upper estimate for the waiting time is too high to be of any use in proving the negative (in less than a billion years, with some zeros perhaps being added --- gazillion critters evolving at once --- or removed). Perhaps the situation will change when we will run computers on circum-solar orbit with quadrillions of processors, harnessing solar power larger than currently received by the entire Earth.

[roberjl]

Piotr-

The "several billion years" of bacterial evolution you mentioned is not long enough for the complexity inherent in biological systems to have evolved by any currently suggested mechanism (neo-Darwinist or otherwise), IMHO. The IDers point to this as evidence of an intelligent creator, while my personal feeling is that biologists are still working out the details of evolution and are as of yet missing some crucial pieces of the puzzle. The gaps will in all likelihood be filled in with naturalistic explanations in time.

I find this whole struggle of evolution vs. ID to be utterly lacking in nuance:

1. The fossil record indicates that biological organisms have changed substantially in history. In its broadest sense, evolution is clearly occuring.

2. Evolution is not yet an entirely self-consistent as a theory. But, for that matter, general relativity and quantum mechanics are not consistent with one another in their current forms. A lack of full self-consistency is not damning for a theory that can make useful predictions -- it just indicates that there is more work to do for a fuller understanding.

3. A statisfactory and complete naturalistic explanation of abiogenesis does not yet exist. It is a shame that I can go to a natural history museum and not realize that this is still an area of active research, but this does not mean that the IDers must be right, either.

4. The intellectual program of ID as espoused by the Discovery Institute could be successful, but only with significant advances in information theory. The requirements would be that the complexity in a system can be well-quantified, the complexity that can be imparted by physical processes in a finite time can be calculated well for a variety of situations, and it must then turn out that biological organisms have too much complexity for any conceivable physical mechanism. Like Piotr, I worry that ennumerating all conceivable mechanisms may be problematic as best and impossible at worst. This line of inquiry, however, may produce some pretty interesting and useful results and I don't see any reason that people having an interest in it should not pursue it.

5. This is a far cry from saying that ID should then be required in any secondary school cirriculum, or that required "disclaimers" about evolution are warranted. ID is a nascent line of inquiry at best and not ready for wide exposure until more work has been done to put it on a more solid foundation (if that even turns out to be possible).

6. If we are going to discuss biblical literalism in our public schools, it must be done in a non-evagelical way in a discussion on world religions and certainly not in the science courses. The backdoor agenda of many of the ID proponents is so obvious as to turn the whole debate on ID vs. evolution into absurd theater.

[roberjl]

Oops -- a clarification:

By "this whole struggle" I meant the struggle in our society as a whole and not the line of comments on this blog in particular.

[IDer]

Uh, astrology *is* a theory, isn't it? Maybe not a scientific theory but it is a theory. Did Behe claim it was a "scientific theory"? (And maybe it is a scientific theory too, just one the evidence against which is very strong).

[CCCB]

Behe said that by how he defines Scientific Theory (his definition is crafted to allow ID to qualify as a Scientific Theory) than Astrology would also qualify as a Scientific Theory. I wouldn't call Astrology a Theory, Astrology is just a crock of crap - and so is ID.

[PaulC]

> Basically, what the irreducible complexity people are doing is exploring the maximins between two evolutionary states. If the maximin seems too high, there are only two possible conclusions: 1) there was no plausible evolutionary path between the states, or 2) you haven't looked hard enough for the saddle point.

I like this way of looking at it. The part that seems strange to me is the assumption that "intelligent" designs don't need a plausible path between them. Look at any human invention, and you will not find an isolated optimum of some objective function, but rather one accessible from other states through successive refinements.

Intelligence also proceeds by marginal changes and exploring recombinations of old ideas. The sort of major insight that leads to a breakthrough usually has low complexity: E.g., "Hmm... what if time itself were to slow down in these cases?" Then you go back to the old machinery to work out the implications, at which point you either make an advance or find a refutation to your new idea.

Like a mutation, the new idea could be beneficial or deleterious. E.g., "Hmm... what if elves are coming into my attic to cobble shoes at night and that's what's keeping me awake?" so even "intelligent" design is very much a matter of selection--what we usually call trial and error. It's slow, but sometimes the only way to make progress.

The key difference is that intelligent systems often make progress without building a prototype, so the transitional forms are even more ephemeral, and the progress is potentially faster. But no human invention could exist without a sequence of transitional forms connected by plausible modifications. So Behe's definitions could conceivably identify "omniscient" design, but it's unclear how they could ever distinguish between evolution and mere human design.

[Maynard Handley]

I am surprised the people do not comment more not on the Design part of ID but the I part. In many many case the I should, apparently, stand for Idiotic design, not intelligent design.

To give my favorite example, humans (and I assume pretty much all air-breathing animals) need oxygen to live, of course, and so panic and get a message sent to their brain saying "do something, anything, damn fast" when they start to run out of air. But, and this is the point, what exactly does "run out of air" mean? The logical thing to do, the Intelligently Designed thing to do, the thing any 1st yr undergrad engineer would tell you to do, is to have an oxygen sensing system in the body that would inform the brain that oxygen levels are too low. But this is not what the body does. What the body has is a CO2 sensing system that panics the brain when CO2 levels are too high. This works fine in the cases that (oh, what a surprise) were actually relevant to the lives of these animals as they evolved, namely you fall in water, you hold your breath, no oxygen comes in but also no CO2 goes out, so CO2 levels rise and you panic.
But it's a system that only works in this one particular case, and can be faked out in both directions. You can feed someone a mixture of air with some nitrogen replaced with CO2, and, even though there is perfectly enough oxygen, they will panic. Or you can feed someone a pure stream of nitrogen with no oxygen and they will happily drift off to endless sleep, unaware that anything is wrong.

What part, exactly, of building a system that doesn't actually solve the problem it is supposed to solve, when building a system that did solve the problem would be just as easy, counts as intelligent design?

[me2i81]

"I'll give the man this much - at least he's honest, even if being under oath in a court of law does constrain one's scope for dishonesty somewhat."

What constraint? No court is going to limit Behe for slinging whatever nonsense he wants to about ID.

[Kip W]

PaulC says something that reminds me of what came to my mind the first time I heard the "Look at this jet airplane. The molecules didn't just fly together, did they? So evolution couldn't have happened!" argument.

My response: Before there was the jet, there was a prop plane. Before there was a monoplane, there were biplanes. Before that, there was the Wright flyer, and before that, gliders. There's evolution right there, in their favorite argument against it.

[Monado]

Oddly enough, Behe seems to have missed the moment six months ago when the irreducible complexity of the flagellum was falsified:

The Reducible flagellum

http://hhmi.org/news/strynadka2.html

The bacteria that cause food poisoning, bubonic plague, and whooping cough all deploy the same weapon to infect the body. A molecular “syringe” sticks out of the bacteria, pokes a hole in a nearby cell, and squirts in venomous proteins that hijack the cell's machinery.

For the first time, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have captured a detailed picture of the large doughnut-shaped base of the syringe barrel embedded in the bacterial membranes. The findings are reported in a paper in the June 2, 2005, issue of the journal Nature.

....

Additionally, the crystal structure may illuminate more bacterial functions than their injection apparatus, Yip said. Several dozen genes clustered together on a region of the chromosome known as a "pathogenicity island" produce the components of the syringe, Yip explained. Interestingly, several of those genes closely resemble another set of genes that make up the flagella... that propel some bacteria.

--article from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

[Monado]

I don't know how you can call Behe honest. He's a bare-faced perjurer. In his testimony, he blithely stated that there was no peer-reviewed research on molecular evolution. I did a quick Web search and found so many links to organizations, conferences, university departments, journals, and papers that my 'blog was tagged as a possible spammer. I stopped adding links not because I ran out but from sheer fatigue. Every one of those journals has articles about molecular evolution. Check it out:
http://monado2.blogspot.com/2005/11/is-there-good-research-on-molecular.html