ID on trial

The issue of teaching ID in schools is going to court in Dover, PA. The NYT has an article on the issue that is well worth reading.

Intelligent Design is not, in any way, a science and has no business being presented in a science classroom. The hallmark of a science is that it makes definite, testable claims about observations that have not yet been made. For some field to be a science there must be some observations, that have not yet been made, and which have at least two outcomes, one of which is consistent with the theory and one of which is inconsistent. Intelligent Design is generally structured to be so vague that it is not possible to make predictions that can be tested. To the extent that it has made testable predictions they have failed. This is not a science.

Check out the following links to read more about ID and evolution

• Talk Origins


• Talk Design


• Talk Reason

Burden of Proof

The link is to a good post in the Prospect concerning burden of proof and the ID movement. They link to this Washington Post article on recent discoveries that support evolution. The cite on burden of proof is on page two where we find the following

Asked to provide examples of non-obvious, testable predictions made by the theory of Intelligent Design, John West, an associate director of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based ID think tank, offered one: In 1998, he said, an ID theorist, reckoning that an intelligent designer would not fill animals' genomes with DNA that had no use, predicted that much of the "junk" DNA in animals' genomes -- long seen as the detritus of evolutionary processes -- will someday be found to have a function.

(In fact, some "junk" DNA has indeed been found to be functional in recent years, though more than 90 percent of human DNA still appears to be the flotsam of biological history.) In any case, West said, it is up to Darwinists to prove ID wrong.

Science proceeds by recognizing uncertainty and seeking ways to reduce it. In doing science we recognize that we start out ignorant and that we will never achieve absolute certainty. Through the process of verification with experiment and observation we can archive ever greater confidence that we know the answer to some question, but absolute certainty is unachievable. Because of this, to any true/false type question there are always three answers, 1) the evidence indicates true, 2) the evidence indicates false and 3) the evidence is insufficient to tell. The burden of proof then falls on whoever claims to be able to answer the question. Failing to provide that burden of proof then leaves the question undecided unless some other scientist can offer evidence supporting another answer. So, for example, for the early Copernicans claiming to know that planets move in elliptical orbits about the sun, they needed to provide evidence supporting this claim, and they did.

Now apply this to ID and evolution. Those of us presenting the conclusions of mainstream science need to provide evidence that organisms share a common ancestor and that natural selection can account for observed variation. And that we can do (see for example the extensive archives at Talk Origins via the links to the right). If the ID theorists want to claim that there exists an intelligent designer, they need to provide evidence of his existence, not, as John West does above, claim that it is the obligation of the scientists to prove the ID assertions wrong.

Furthermore, on the subject of Junk DNA see this article on Talk Origins. Significant evidence indicates that it is indeed "junk".

Behe and Irreducible Complexity

My response to Behe and his argument from Irreducible Complexity is that it appears to have nothing, except in the most superficial sense, with biology. Yes, he presents it as an argument about evolution and natural selection, but as presented, at least with his mouse trap example, it is almost totally divorced from actual biology. Let me explain why I think this is so.

He presents the mouse trap as a means of illustrating this idea of an object that is irreducibly complex and therefore cannot be produced by natural selection. He argues that you cannot take the several pieces of the mouse trap and assemble those pieces one at a time into the final mouse trap and have a functional mouse trap at each step. Many have pointed out that this argument leaves out change in function, which is a valid point, but even without that problem I think his example has nothing to do with natural selection, or even biology. When he talks about assembling the mouse trap by successively adding parts, he is clearly talking about the parts of the final mousetrap. So, if you were to try and assemble the trap starting with the striker bar, you must use the bar from the final trap. You could not start with something that on its own serves to kill mice and later, as more parts are added, is modified into the final striker bar. He makes no effort whatsoever to argue that you cannot get to the final mouse trap by such a process of addition and modification. He fails to show that you cannot assemble the final mouse trap by adding parts which are modified between additions. The parts in his analogy, in other words, do not change. It is this which is at odds with actual biology.

The problem is even more striking if we look at biology a little deeper. If we are to consider some system in an organism, analogous Behe's mouse trap, whether irreducible or not, then in each generation the system is modified slightly by whatever mutations might occur. So the "addition of a part" which is the only process that Behe discusses occurring is something that takes place from one generation to another. That is some offspring have one 'part' more than the parents had. But we know of the kinds of changes that take place between generations. The types of mutations include point mutations, insertions, deletions, gene duplications and cooption (the process whereby a part which exsists in one system serving one function is taken over by another system to serve another function). Most of these changes involve the modification of parts in exactly the way that is excluded in Behe's analogy. Furthermore, the only processes that might be accurately described as 'adding parts' are
1) cooption and
2) gene duplication followed by modification

The problem here then is that Behe and Dembski specifically deny that cooption is a force in evolution which eliminates option 1 and option 2 includes gene modification which is nonexistent in Behe's analogy.

In short the problem is that if Behe recognizes that the 'parts' of biological systems are modified by evolution, then his argument with the mouse trap says nothing about whether you can produce such a thing by the gradual process of natural selection. If he denies that biological 'parts' are modified in each generation he is at odds with most of what is actually observed about living things.