Guest Post by Morbo
Of all the arguments creationists and backers of “intelligent design” dredge up, the one that annoys me most is the argument from personal ignorance.
A scientist’s job is to look for answers. When something doesn’t make sense, you keep digging. If pieces of the puzzle are missing, you look for them. Throwing up your hand invoking the supernatural doesn’t cut it. That’s not science.
Yet that is exactly what Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.., has done. A recent profile of Behe in the Allentown Morning Call contains this passage:
But [Behe] thinks that the development is too complicated, or as he puts it, irreducibly complex, to have evolved entirely on its own through a step-by-step process. As a result, Behe says it can only be the product of an intelligent designer, which, as a Catholic, he believes is God.
“It’s utterly improbable that the parts of this just fell together any more than the parts fell together to make this mouse trap,” Behe said, motioning to a large rat trap he keeps in his office to help explain his beliefs.
No, it’s not utterly improbable. Real scientists have explained it. The fact that Behe, author of the popular ID tome Darwin’s Black Box, can’t or won’t accept that explanation does not excuse recourse to miracles and the supernatural. Such things have no place in science.
One of the IDers favorite examples is the human eye. They can’t seem to understand how the human eye, with its many complex features, could have evolved over time. Since they are too ignorant to figure it out, they resort to the supernatural.
Actually, the evolution of the eye is understood by real scientists, and Richard Dawkins demolished the ID position on the eye in The Blind Watchmaker in 1987. To summarize, organisms begin with crude, photoreceptive cells. Over time, natural selection leads to a complex eye, crafting it from simpler components.
In an excellent piece in The New Republic, Jerry Coyne, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, confronted Behe’s “irreducibly complex” argument — and left it in tatters. Coyne points out that, for most creatures, partial vision is better than total blindness. Thus, even crude light receptors provide an advantage. Over time — millions of years of time — an eye evolves that can fairly be called complex. But even that eye has its disadvantages.
Pardon the length of this passage, but it is worth quoting at length. Coyne writes:
The human eye, though eminently functional, is imperfect – certainly not the sort of eye an engineer would create from scratch. Its imperfection arises precisely because our eye evolved using whatever components were at hand, or produced by mutation. Since our retina evolved from an everted part of the brain, for example, the nerves and blood vessels that attach to our photoreceptor cells are on the inside rather than the outside of the eye, running over the surface of the retina. Leakage of these blood vessels can occlude vision, a problem that would not occur if the vessels fed the retina from behind. Likewise, to get the nerve impulses from the photocells to the brain, the different nerves must join together and dive back through the eye, forming the optic nerve. This hole in the retina creates a blind spot in the eye, a flaw that again would be avoidable with a priori design. The whole system is like a car in which all the wires to the dashboard hang inside the driver’s compartment instead of being tucked safely out of sight. Evolution differs from a priori design because it is constrained to operate by modifying whatever features have evolved previously. Thus evolution yields fitter types that often have flaws. These flaws violate reasonable principles of intelligent design.
(As an aside, let me add that personally, I think the Designer did a lousy job on our eyes, and I’m pissed that I have to sit here peering at this screen through corrective lenses. Squids, I have read, have a better eye than humans. Stupid squids! I thought we were the Designer’s favorite species?)
Coyne’s piece is a hammer, and it should leave Behe reeling. The reason it won’t is that Behe isn’t a real scientist, he’s an evangelist. (We’re talking about a guy with nine children, whose wife home-schools them all. Was that a cheap shot? Sorry.)
In the Call interview, Behe whines that his views mean he’ll never be inducted into the prestigious National Academy of Scientists. He tries hard to portray himself as some bold, unorthodox thinker whose views will some day be vindicated.
Sorry. That’s not going to happen. Behe’s ideas will be tossed in the dust heap of science history alongside other discredited notions. He won’t ever make it into the National Academy of Science and for good reason: He doesn’t belong there. It’s for scientists. Behe is not a scientist. How do we know that? Well, confronted with a mystery he could not explain, Behe threw up his hands and said, “I dunno, it must be magic.”
Call that what you will, but it sure isn’t science. Want to know what real scientists do? Check out this Washington Post article on the team that just finished mapping the genetic code of the chimpanzee. Now that’s science. Real cool science, too.