Behe Part 3: The Big Flop
Under cross-examination, Michael Behe continued denying that Pandas means what it so clearly says, e.g.:
Q And that s the text that says, “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency.” Correct?
A Yes.
Q It talks about the life beginning abruptly, not just appearing abruptly, correct?
A Well, that s certainly the word it used, but we can ask, how do we know it began abruptly? The only way that we know it began abruptly is through the fossil record.
Q But beginning is different than appearances in the fossil record, correct, Professor Behe?
A I don t take it to mean that way, no.
Later, Rothschild asked a question I’ve been asking for a while now:
So this is back to the claim that you say itelligent design makes, “Intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on the proposed mechanism of how complex biological structures arose.”
Please describe the mechanism that intelligent design proposes for how complex biological structures arose.
Behe replied with three paragraphs that said nothing, so Rothschild persisted:
Q Back to my original question. What is the mechanism that intelligent design proposes?
A And I wonder, could — am I permitted to know what I replied to your question the first time?
Q I don t think I got a reply, so I m asking you
In fairness to Behe, I understand that it’s stressful to be on the stand, with a hostile lawyer asking questions over and over from all sorts of directions to try to poke holes in your story, having to watch your every word, and trying to make sure that your testimony not only is consistent, but also appears consistent. That can explain a lot of Behe’s evasive, rambling answers and quibbling over words.
But compare that to this passage from Ken Miller’s cross-examination:
Q. In terms of the modern description of this peer review, none of that standard, Darwin’s Origin of Species wasn’t a peer reviewed book as well?
A. Well, first of all, books are rarely peer reviewed today, yesterday, ever. For example, when I wrote Finding Darwin’s God, I did what a lot of writers do, and I bet ya what Dr. Behe did when he wrote Darwin’s Black Box, which is, I thought about a book I’d like to write.[Snip a paragraph about finding a publisher] And I bet ya the same process went into Dr. Behe’s book.
That doesn’t qualify as peer review any under circumstance. Now you raise the specific example of a book written by Darwin, called the Origin of Species. […] My understanding of how the ideas in that book were developed was that, Charles Darwin wrote many letters, essays, and small articles which were read before the royal society in London.
The discussion and criticism of those individual letters which were read was a normal part of the scientific process in Great Britain in the 1840’s and 1850’s. So that most of the ideas that Darwin incorporated in the Origin of Species actually had been subjected to something that today we would recognize as peer review, which is advice, criticism, analysis, critical analysis by one’s colleagues.
The publication of that book, was that a peer reviewed publication? Of course not, for the reasons I’ve given. Were Darwin’s ideas themselves subjected to peer view? The answer is, as it existed in the 1840’s and 1850’s, yes.
I think this summarizes their respective approaches. Behe is saying “No, you’re wrong because you didn’t ask the question in exactly the right way”. Miller comes across as saying, “You’re mostly right. Here’s the detail that you got wrong.” Behe sounds defensive, yielding an inch here, an inch there, and fiercely defending the tiny corner he’s backed himself into. Miller seems to be outside of the battle altogether.
Getting back to Behe’s cross-examination: apparently he gave away the store in his deposition:
Q And then further down the page at line 24 I asked you, “In terms of the mechanism, it’s just a criticism of Darwinian evolution’s mechanism and not a positive description of a mechanism.” And what did you answer, Professor Behe?
A I said “that s correct.”
There’s more to it, of course, but basically he’s admitted here that ID has nothing new to offer. That, as Raven put it, it boils down to “nuh-uh!”
Rothschild tried to get Behe to admit that the intelligent designer was God:
Q Now, you’ve told this Court that intelligent design does not involve supernatural action, correct?
A That s correct. I — no, I said that it — it’s — intelligent design is a scientific theory that focuses exclusively on physical data and logical inferences.
Rothschild then quoted from Darwin’s Black Box where Behe says that
[Biochemical systems] were designed not by the laws of nature
I.e., by something other than the laws of nature, i.e., the supernatural. Just for emphasis, Behe makes this same claim in Reply to My Critics, so he can’t say that he just expressed himself poorly the first time.
The next morning, there was this exchange between Rothschild and the judge:
THE COURT: How much more cross do you have?
MR. ROTHSCHILD: It will be inversely proportional to mentions of the Big Bang, I think.
THE COURT: So you’re going to go all day.
MR. ROTHSCHILD: It could be quite a while.
(I’m pretty sure he meant “proportional”, not “inversely proportional”, though. But I shouldn’t expect numeracy from lawyers.)
He even tried to make a deal with Behe:
Q. So I’m going to propose an agreement. I won’t ask you any questions about the Big Bang, and you won’t answer any questions about the Big Bang. Can we agree to that, Professor Behe?
MR. MUISE: Objection, Your Honor. […]
Q. Fair to say, Professor Behe, that over the last two days of testimony, you’ve told us everything you know about the Big Bang that’s relevant to the issue of intelligent design and biology?
A. Well, I’m not sure. I would have to reserve judgment.
Q. You might have some more?
A. Perhaps.
Q. Let the record state, I tried.
And later:
A. That does not go into sufficient detail to describe my view.
Q. I hesitate to ask whether this will involve the Big Bang, but give us a little more detail.
After an admission by Behe that there were no papers on ID in the peer-reviewed literature, Rothschild moved on to Darwin’s Black Box, which Behe said “received much more scrutiny and much more review before publication than the great majority of scientific journal articles.”
One of the reviewers was one Michael Atchison, a biochemist at the Veterinary School at the University of Pennsylvania. It turns out that the editor mentioned Darwin’s Black Box to his wife. She had taken a course from Atchison, and gave him a call. Here’s what Atchison wrote about it:
She advised her husband to give me a call. So unaware of all this, I received a phone call from the publisher in New York. We spent approximately ten minutes on the phone. After hearing a description of the work, I suggested that the editor should seriously consider publishing the manuscript.
Wow! Ten whole minutes? But Behe said that his book got a more review than most research papers, so presumably Atchison’s recommendation simply confirmed several other, more thorough reviews by qualified biochemists, right?
In November 1998, I finally met Michael Behe when he visited Penn for a faculty outreach talk. He told me that, yes, indeed, it was his book that the publisher called me about. In fact, he said my comments were the deciding factor in convincing the publisher to go ahead with the book.
One hesitates to use the words “lie” or “perjury”, but it does seem as if Dr. Behe was using the word “review” in a somewhat idiosyncratic sense.
At one point, Rothschild interrupted one of Behe’s rambling evasions:
MR. MUISE: Objection, Your Honor. He’s attempting to answer the question.
MR. ROTHSCHILD: He’s attempting to evade the question, Your Honor.
In a discussion of Darwin’s Black Box, Rothschild quoted one of Behe’s admissions:
Q. […]”Thus, there is an asymmetry between my current definition of irreducible complexity and the task facing natural selection. I hope to repair this defect in future work.” That’s what you wrote, correct?
A. Yes.
Q. You haven’t repaired that defect, have you, Professor Behe?
A. No, I did not judge it serious enough to do so yet.
Darwin’s Black Box Came out in 1995. WTF has he been doing all this time? It’s not as if he’s done any actual research in ID or anything. One would have hoped that in ten years, he’d have fleshed out his theory, or at least come up with some quantifiable metrics by which to measure the probability of an IC system evolving naturally.
Q. […]And you haven’t actually quantified this, have you?
A. Not explicitly,
Rothschild tried to get Behe to answer some of the specific questions some of us have been asking about ID since the beginning, such as how one goes from design to an actual organism, or whether the putative designer designed each type of bacterial flagellum, or just the first one, and so forth.
Q. And did the designer also design every mutation of the flagellum since its inception?
A. No, you can’t — you certainly can’t say that. There is certainly random processes that go on in our world, or for processes, that for all we can tell, certainly appear to be random. So there’s no — nothing that requires us to think that any mutation, any change that subsequently occurs to this structure either was intended or — was intended.
Q. Is that a no or an I don’t know?
A. Can you restate the question?
Then there was the all-important discussion on how well ID theory has survived rigorous experimental testing:
Q. Now you haven’t tested intelligent design yourself this way, have you?
A. No, I have not.
Q. And nobody in the intelligent design movement has?
A. That’s correct.
Q. Okay. So you can’t claim that the proposition that the bacterial flagellum was intelligently designed is a well-tested proposition?
A. Yes, you can, I’m afraid. It’s well-tested from the inductive argument.
The “inductive argument” in this case being “it looks designed, therefore it was designed. And everything leading up to it looks designed, too. Therefore, God intelligent designer. QED.”
Q. Professor Behe, you say right here, here is the test, here is the test that science should do, grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory. And that hasn’t been done, correct?
A. That has not been done.
Q. In any event, you have not undertaken the kind of test you describe here for any of the irreducibly complex systems you have identified?
A. I have not.
To be fair, I should point out that I’m leaving stuff out about experiments being done by other people. But what it boils down to is that there’s the ID movement, and they don’t perform any experiments, on the grounds that it’s up to mainstream scientists to disprove ID. And there are real scientists, who actually do perform experiments, some of which even have a bearing on ID. Now, I may be biased, but my money’s on the guys actually getting their hands dirty in the lab and in the field.
Toward the end of the morning, we were treated to a lot of irony in a few words:
Q. You define the system in whatever way is convenient to the argument?
A. I define the system very carefully to make sure that people understand what I’m talking about.
The next day continued much in the same vein, with Rothschild asking more of the questions and bringing up arguments Behe should have asked himself before publishing his “theory”:
If AIDS or anthrax is designed, and the human immune system is designed, then two designs are working at cross-purposes. Why would the designer do this?
How do you get from design to implementation?
Watches don’t reproduce, so right off the bat, Paley’s watchmaker argument is flawed.
Yes, archeologists try to figure out whether a given item is designed or not. But they also assume that the designers in question are human, which tells them a lot about the designers’ motivations, capabilities, and limitations.
Rothschild buried Behe under fifty books, chapters, and articles with titles like Origin and
Evolution of the Vertebrate Immune System. Behe’s answer? That while he hasn’t read them, he doubts that they explain the evolution of the immune system in as much detail as he would like. This from the man who hasn’t bothered to quantify the probabilities he refers to, or come up with more than four IC systems, or perform any tests, or even try to deduce something about the designer.
He also admitted that Pandas was mischaracterizing evolution. May I suggest that Kent Hovind add this to his “Lies in the Textbooks” talk?
Somewhere around this point, the PDF file stopped exhibiting signs of design, so it’s hard to tell what else happened.
I’m not sure what to make of Behe. He’s not stupid, not in the can’t-tie-his-shoes sense. He’s not completely oblivious to criticism, as some creationists who’ll continue making the same arguments over and over, long after they’ve been thorougly refuted. But he does seem to have gotten his mind stuck on the idea of irreducible complexity, and how it implies the existence of God. A sensible person would have admitted defeat, or at least admitted that his was a very hypothetical notion that needs a lot more work before it can gain acceptance in mainstream science.
A cynic might say that he’s in it for the money: by all accounts, Darwin’s Black Box is a best-seller. But if money were really a major motivation in his life, he probably wouldn’t have gone into research in the first place. Plus, he hasn’t written any sequels.
More likely, I suspect, he sees himself as a Galileo fighting a hostile establishment. That, and his buddies at the Discovery Institute give him enough encouragement and praise to keep him going (he is, after all, a prize catch for them: an honest-to-goodness scientific researcher who says there’s scientific evidence for God). If he admits defeat now, he’ll lose a lot of face, and probably sink into oblivion, one of the many people in the history of science who contributed a few bricks to the edifice of our knowledge, then turned into a kook in later life.