Behe and Intelligent Design

Last night Dr. Michael Behe came to give a lecture here on the campus of the University of Minnesota. A friend of mine and I went. It was in one of the large lecture halls in the physics building, and was standing room only.

For those of you not familiar with him, Behe is one of the most well-known proponents of the intelligent design framework. His book, Darwin's Black Box, is one of the standard texts in the field of intelligent design.

(Behe said he will be providing testimony at some point in the ID trial underway in Pennsylvania.)

Behe only spoke for a little over an hour (with about 20 minutes for questions), so he gave a quick overview of his case for ID. But what he did have to say was quite interesting.

One point he made is that everyone, even Darwinists, would say many, if not most, things in biology look designed. Of course Darwinists would say the design came through random mutations and natural selection, but nevertheless, biological structures looked like their parts were aggregated for a purpose.

He gave the example of a flagellum in bacteria, a small strand a bacteria uses to propel itself. (My background is in physics, not biology, so forgive any errors here.) The mechanism by which this flagellum works functions basically like an outboard motor.

Behe is particulary known for his argument for design from irreducible complexity. This means, in many biological structures, if you took away one component, the whole structure would cease to function. The argument, then, is how could something have evolved in stages, if all of the components need to be there for a biological function to work at all.

One example from his book is the blood clotting cascade. The biochemical steps the body goes through to form a clot, from the moment you cut yourself, say, to when the clot forms, are amazing.

A clot is formed by fibrin, but that can't exist in your bloodstream all the time, or the blood in your veins would clot up. So, there's an inert form in your bloodstream called fibrinogen. Something needs to tell fibrinogen to change into fibrin, and that something is called thrombin. But, similarly, that can't always exist in your bloodstream, or your fibrinogen would turn into fibrin. So, there's an inert form in your bloodstream called prothrombin. And, similarly, something needs to act to turn prothrombin into thrombin when a clot is need, and so on. There are several such steps involved.

Behe's argument is that you take one of these steps away, and you can't form blood clots, and you bleed to death. How did something like that evolve, if you need all these factors and their inert forms and ways to signal them to act in your blood all at once?

Behe spent a little time talking about reaction to this argument, and his response to the reaction. I won't summarize all that here. You can read about, for instance see here.

I've not read a great deal on ID, but I was thinking along such lines before I had ever heard of ID. I mean, so many things look like they were designed with a purpose in mind. To me, the Designer is the Creator.

It goes without saying that many scientists who believe in evolution react to ID as if you suggested the world was created by little Keebler elves. They do not believe ID is scientific.

Behe made the point though last night that Darwinists cannot explain exactly how the pathways by which biological structures like the flagellum, or processes like blood clotting, evolved. Sure, there are many explanations and attempts at explanations, but when it comes down to it, these explanations boil down to "well, this might have..."

Behe is really just trying to have a scientific argument, asking the question, if these processes really are irreducibly complex, how is it possible that something evolved? Can anyone explain how such a structure could have evolved? Behe is really not trying to have a theological or philosophical argument.

Abednego at the Parableman blog has a current example of the Darwinist reaction to the ID community. He tells of a petition going around. Read the post and see what they're objecting to.

A couple times during the lecture last night, someone would hiss, or murmur, and after one person asked a question that seemed to really get Behe (zing! we gotcha!) some people clapped and cheered.

But just what are they cheering? What victory do they think they won? The people in the ID field are just trying to have a debate on the merits. That is what science is supposed to be about, after all. But as I wrote about here, there is more involved with these matters than just pure science.