Inferior Design
Enviado: 04 Jul 2007, 18:20
Inferior Design
By RICHARD DAWKINS
THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION
The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.
By Michael J. Behe.
I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe's second book as by
his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first -
"Darwin's Black Box" (1996), which purported to make the scientific case
for "intelligent design" - was enlivened by a spark of conviction,
however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up.
Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe
has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he
has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science,
in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh
University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on
its Web site: "While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views,
they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is
our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science,
has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as
scientific." As the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote recently, in a
devastating review of Behe's work in The New Republic, it would be hard
to find a precedent.
For a while, Behe built a nice little career on being a maverick. His
colleagues might have disowned him, but they didn't receive flattering
invitations to speak all over the country and to write for The New York
Times. Behe's name, and not theirs, crackled triumphantly around the
memosphere. But things went wrong, especially at the famous 2005 trial
where Judge John E. Jones III immortally summed up as "breathtaking
inanity" the effort to introduce intelligent design into the school
curriculum in Dover, Pa. After his humiliation in court, Behe - the star
witness for the creationist side - might have wished to re-establish his
scientific credentials and start over. Unfortunately, he had dug himself
in too deep. He had to soldier on. "The Edge of Evolution" is the messy
result, and it doesn't make for attractive reading.
We now hear less about "irreducible complexity," with good reason. In
"Darwin's Black Box," Behe simply asserted without justification that
particular biological structures (like the bacterial flagellum, the tiny
propeller by which bacteria swim) needed all their parts to be in place
before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved
incrementally. This style of argument remains as unconvincing as when
Darwin himself anticipated it. It commits the logical error of arguing
by default. Two rival theories, A and B, are set up. Theory A explains
loads of facts and is supported by mountains of evidence. Theory B has
no supporting evidence, nor is any attempt made to find any. Now a
single little fact is discovered, which A allegedly can't explain.
Without even asking whether B can explain it, the default conclusion is
fallaciously drawn: B must be correct. Incidentally, further research
usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the
biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the
other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial
flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.
Behe correctly dissects the Darwinian theory into three parts: descent
with modification, natural selection and mutation. Descent with
modification gives him no problems, nor does natural selection. They are
"trivial" and "modest" notions, respectively. Do his creationist fans
know that Behe accepts as "trivial" the fact that we are African apes,
cousins of monkeys, descended from fish?
The crucial passage in "The Edge of Evolution" is this: "By far the most
critical aspect of Darwin's multifaceted theory is the role of random
mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought
is concentrated in this third concept."
What a bizarre thing to say! Leave aside the history: unacquainted with
genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at
random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for
all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process
whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably
the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it -
alone as far as we know - explains the elegant illusion of design that
pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else
it is, natural selection is not a "modest" idea, nor is descent with
modification.
But let's follow Behe down his solitary garden path and see where his
overrating of random mutation leads him. He thinks there are not enough
mutations to allow the full range of evolution we observe. There is an
"edge," beyond which God must step in to help. Selection of random
mutation may explain the malarial parasite's resistance to chloroquine,
but only because such micro-organisms have huge populations and short
life cycles. A fortiori, for Behe, evolution of large, complex creatures
with smaller populations and longer generations will fail, starved of
mutational raw materials.
If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change,
this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection.
Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational
variation as natural selection. Now, if you sought an experimental test
of Behe's theory, what would you do? You'd take a wild species, say a
wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection
experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that
chivies rabbits underground: let's call it a Jack Russell terrier. Or
how about an adorable, fluffy pet wolf called, for the sake of argument,
a Pekingese? Or a heavyset, thick-coated wolf, strong enough to carry a
cask of brandy, that thrives in Alpine passes and might be named after
one of them, the St. Bernard? Behe has to predict that you'd wait till
hell freezes over, but the necessary mutations would not be forthcoming.
Your wolves would stubbornly remain unchanged. Dogs are a mathematical
impossibility.
Don't evade the point by protesting that dog breeding is a form of
intelligent design. It is (kind of), but Behe, having lost the argument
over irreducible complexity, is now in his desperation making a
completely different claim: that mutations are too rare to permit
significant evolutionary change anyway. From Newfies to Yorkies, from
Weimaraners to water spaniels, from Dalmatians to dachshunds, as I
incredulously close this book I seem to hear mocking barks and deep,
baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs - every one descended
from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by
geological standards, instantaneous.
If correct, Behe's calculations would at a stroke confound generations
of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary
rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on
Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky,
Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented
co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the
inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire
corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong.
Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only
one who has done his sums right. You think?
The best way to find out is for Behe to submit a mathematical paper to
The Journal of Theoretical Biology, say, or The American Naturalist,
whose editors would send it to qualified referees. They might liken
Behe's error to the belief that you can't win a game of cards unless you
have a perfect hand. But, not to second-guess the referees, my point is
that Behe, as is normal at the grotesquely ill-named Discovery Institute
(a tax-free charity, would you believe?), where he is a senior fellow,
has bypassed the peer-review procedure altogether, gone over the heads
of the scientists he once aspired to number among his peers, and
appealed directly to a public that - as he and his publisher know - is
not qualified to rumble him.
Richard Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi chair for the public
understanding of science at Oxford. His most recent book is "The God
Delusion."
By RICHARD DAWKINS
THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION
The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.
By Michael J. Behe.
I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe's second book as by
his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first -
"Darwin's Black Box" (1996), which purported to make the scientific case
for "intelligent design" - was enlivened by a spark of conviction,
however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up.
Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe
has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he
has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science,
in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh
University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on
its Web site: "While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views,
they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is
our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science,
has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as
scientific." As the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote recently, in a
devastating review of Behe's work in The New Republic, it would be hard
to find a precedent.
For a while, Behe built a nice little career on being a maverick. His
colleagues might have disowned him, but they didn't receive flattering
invitations to speak all over the country and to write for The New York
Times. Behe's name, and not theirs, crackled triumphantly around the
memosphere. But things went wrong, especially at the famous 2005 trial
where Judge John E. Jones III immortally summed up as "breathtaking
inanity" the effort to introduce intelligent design into the school
curriculum in Dover, Pa. After his humiliation in court, Behe - the star
witness for the creationist side - might have wished to re-establish his
scientific credentials and start over. Unfortunately, he had dug himself
in too deep. He had to soldier on. "The Edge of Evolution" is the messy
result, and it doesn't make for attractive reading.
We now hear less about "irreducible complexity," with good reason. In
"Darwin's Black Box," Behe simply asserted without justification that
particular biological structures (like the bacterial flagellum, the tiny
propeller by which bacteria swim) needed all their parts to be in place
before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved
incrementally. This style of argument remains as unconvincing as when
Darwin himself anticipated it. It commits the logical error of arguing
by default. Two rival theories, A and B, are set up. Theory A explains
loads of facts and is supported by mountains of evidence. Theory B has
no supporting evidence, nor is any attempt made to find any. Now a
single little fact is discovered, which A allegedly can't explain.
Without even asking whether B can explain it, the default conclusion is
fallaciously drawn: B must be correct. Incidentally, further research
usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the
biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the
other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial
flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.
Behe correctly dissects the Darwinian theory into three parts: descent
with modification, natural selection and mutation. Descent with
modification gives him no problems, nor does natural selection. They are
"trivial" and "modest" notions, respectively. Do his creationist fans
know that Behe accepts as "trivial" the fact that we are African apes,
cousins of monkeys, descended from fish?
The crucial passage in "The Edge of Evolution" is this: "By far the most
critical aspect of Darwin's multifaceted theory is the role of random
mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought
is concentrated in this third concept."
What a bizarre thing to say! Leave aside the history: unacquainted with
genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at
random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for
all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process
whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably
the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it -
alone as far as we know - explains the elegant illusion of design that
pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else
it is, natural selection is not a "modest" idea, nor is descent with
modification.
But let's follow Behe down his solitary garden path and see where his
overrating of random mutation leads him. He thinks there are not enough
mutations to allow the full range of evolution we observe. There is an
"edge," beyond which God must step in to help. Selection of random
mutation may explain the malarial parasite's resistance to chloroquine,
but only because such micro-organisms have huge populations and short
life cycles. A fortiori, for Behe, evolution of large, complex creatures
with smaller populations and longer generations will fail, starved of
mutational raw materials.
If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change,
this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection.
Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational
variation as natural selection. Now, if you sought an experimental test
of Behe's theory, what would you do? You'd take a wild species, say a
wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection
experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that
chivies rabbits underground: let's call it a Jack Russell terrier. Or
how about an adorable, fluffy pet wolf called, for the sake of argument,
a Pekingese? Or a heavyset, thick-coated wolf, strong enough to carry a
cask of brandy, that thrives in Alpine passes and might be named after
one of them, the St. Bernard? Behe has to predict that you'd wait till
hell freezes over, but the necessary mutations would not be forthcoming.
Your wolves would stubbornly remain unchanged. Dogs are a mathematical
impossibility.
Don't evade the point by protesting that dog breeding is a form of
intelligent design. It is (kind of), but Behe, having lost the argument
over irreducible complexity, is now in his desperation making a
completely different claim: that mutations are too rare to permit
significant evolutionary change anyway. From Newfies to Yorkies, from
Weimaraners to water spaniels, from Dalmatians to dachshunds, as I
incredulously close this book I seem to hear mocking barks and deep,
baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs - every one descended
from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by
geological standards, instantaneous.
If correct, Behe's calculations would at a stroke confound generations
of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary
rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on
Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky,
Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented
co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the
inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire
corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong.
Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only
one who has done his sums right. You think?
The best way to find out is for Behe to submit a mathematical paper to
The Journal of Theoretical Biology, say, or The American Naturalist,
whose editors would send it to qualified referees. They might liken
Behe's error to the belief that you can't win a game of cards unless you
have a perfect hand. But, not to second-guess the referees, my point is
that Behe, as is normal at the grotesquely ill-named Discovery Institute
(a tax-free charity, would you believe?), where he is a senior fellow,
has bypassed the peer-review procedure altogether, gone over the heads
of the scientists he once aspired to number among his peers, and
appealed directly to a public that - as he and his publisher know - is
not qualified to rumble him.
Richard Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi chair for the public
understanding of science at Oxford. His most recent book is "The God
Delusion."
