http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/03/22/how-little-you-know-the-deniable-darwin-by-david-berlinski/
This blog is named “Hot Air”, which given the subject matter of the article, is an appropriate title. The claims in the article regarding evolution are what we would expect from an Intelligent Design proponent. Let’s take the time to pick them apart piece-by-piece.
“Berlinski argues that the Darwinists remain very far from demonstrating and evidencing how evolution via random mutation and natural selection could explain what the evolutionists claim it explains – that is, everything.”
Supporters of evolution would never (should never) make the claim that evolution explains everything. This is a tactic used by the IDers. Its intention is to say that since evolutionists claim that evolution explains everything even though it cannot, that evolution is therefore false. It is difficult to debate this claim due to this false assertion. There is no point in attempting to prove that random mutation and natural selection explains “everything”.
“The most you can say about Berlinski’s argument on this score – the argument he actually makes as opposed to the one he’s frequently assumed to be making – is that it points, insistently, to obviously “design-like” aspects of the natural world that no biologist has been able to explain except by childlike inferences, circular reasoning, and “just-so” stories – how this, that, or the other biological peculiarity might/must have served a survival purpose – and by scandalously oversold pseudo-experiments.”
Pointing to “design-like” aspects of the natural world is not a refutation of evolutionary theory. All Berlinkski has succeeded in doing is proving that scientists do not possess all the answers. Scientists would hasten to agree. Beyond that, how does Berlinksi account for aspects of nature that appear to be the work of a designer who got drunk one night? (see: Flying Spaghetti Monster). Evidence of poor design isn’t proof that evolution occurred. It is intended to show that the argument that nature was designed does not hold up in a scientific debate.
“Yet if we can’t really explain how the incredible yet inescapably fundamental complexity of a single functioning living cell arises and elaborates itself, armies of just-in-time enzymes translating intricately arranged protein instructions into vitality, then in the broad sense whatever else we know, or think we know, about the origins of higher organisms and ecosystems remains at root a narrative, a matter of taste or contingency, not a full-fledged theory in the same way that relativity and quantum mechanics are theories – good and tested to n decimals, as Berlinski likes to remind his readers.”
The complexity of a cell is not evidence for design. The author here is unable to entertain the notion that complex aspects of nature occurred without a designer. Translated: it’s too complex for me to understand. Therefore, evolution is false. The argument comes from the idea of irreducible complexity put forth by Michael Behe and is best refuted by the following:
“To understand why the scientific community has been unimpressed by attempts to resurrect the so-called argument from design, one need look no further than Michael J. Behe’s own essay. He argues that complex biochemical systems could not possibly have been produced by evolution because they possess a quality he calls irreducible complexity. Just like mousetraps, these systems cannot function unless each of their parts is in place. Since “natural selection can only choose among systems that are already working,” there is no way that Darwinian mechanisms could have fashioned the complex systems found in living cells. And if such systems could not have evolved, they must have been designed. That is the totality of the biochemical “evidence” for intelligent design.
Ironically, Behe’s own example, the mousetrap, shows what’s wrong with this idea. Take away two parts (the catch and the metal bar), and you may not have a mousetrap but you do have a three-part machine that makes a fully functional tie clip or paper clip. Take away the spring, and you have a two-part key chain. The catch of some mousetraps could be used as a fishhook, and the wooden base as a paperweight; useful applications of other parts include everything from toothpicks to nutcrackers and clipboard holders. The point, which science has long understood, is that bits and pieces of supposedly irreducibly complex machines may have different — but still useful — functions.
Behe’s contention that each and every piece of a machine, mechanical or biochemical, must be assembled in its final form before anything useful can emerge is just plain wrong. Evolution produces complex biochemical machines by copying, modifying, and combining proteins previously used for other functions.
…
And Behe may throw up his hands and say that he cannot imagine how the components that move proteins between subcellular compartments could have evolved, but scientists actually working on such systems completely disagree. In a 1998 article in the journal Cell, a group led by James Rothman, of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, described the remarkable simplicity and uniformity of these mechanisms. They also noted that these mechanisms “suggest in a natural way how the many and diverse compartments in eukaryotic cells could have evolved in the first place.” Working researchers, it seems, see something very different from what Behe sees in these systems — they see evolution.” (http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html)
Science has explained what IDers are claiming it has been unable to.
No comments:
Post a Comment