What Hath Intelligent Design Wrought?

Andrea Bottero looks at one of the Irreducibly Compex Systems featured in Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box (DBB). She also looks at Behe's response to this examination, a response which seems to involve moving goal posts.

In DBB, Behe marvels at the way the immune system reconfigures itself to recognize an endless variety of intruders. In order to function, it has to be able to distinguish "self" from "other". The problem is, while there is only one "self", there are quite a few more "others". The immune system has to be able to recognize them all and deal with them. The solution used in jawed vertebrates is a scheme which randomly assembles DNA fragments from different families to create proteins that will attach to different molecular targets. There's a fair amount of complicated machinery associated with this, and it's easy to see how someone could be Deeply Impressed by it.

The ID-IOT method of dealing with the complexity is to surrender. ID-IOTs declare the system too complex, and therefore it must have been created intelligently designed.

...continued in full post...

Those of you who are used to the ID approach on science, i.e. giving up on it, can probably already see where the problem lies: this is a complex system of functionally inter-related components that, looked at superficially, simply cannot work in isolation. <snip> Now, in evolutionary terms the obvious question to ask is indeed what function could any precursor of this system have had, before the evolution of the adaptive immune system. Some ideas were already around at the time of DBB's publication, and had been for a while. <snip> To be fair, at the time the hypothesis was indeed quite a stretch, but still, a stretch that made some specific predictions. No sooner had Behe's words been put to print, those predictions started coming true.

There follows nearly a decade of research, by the end of which:

Let's summarize: where once Behe saw an "irreducibly complex" system made of a) a receptor gene, b) a RAG recombinase, and c) RSSs, we now know that a) whole families of non-rearranging receptors and b) a whole family of functional RAG1 homologues acting on c) RSS-like sequences already existed before the emergence of the vertebrate adaptive immune system. Exactly what we would expect to see if the adaptive immune system did arise via an evolutionary process, as opposed to poof into existence in its complete form.

Interestingly enough, while ID-IOT has never managed to make any specific predictions, it's been possible for people to make specific predictions about ID-IOT and those who advocate it:

Is Behe going to concede that evolutionary models for the origin of VDJ recombination are gaining more and more support by the day? Probably not, frankly. No matter how many predictions get verified, how many plausible precursors are identified, Behe and the ID advocates will retreat further and further into impossible demands, such as asking for mutation-by-mutation accounts of specific evolutionary pathways, as if one could meaningfully recreate in the lab the precise evolutionary conditions which some mud-dwelling lamprey-like critter experienced some time in the Cambrian. Too much has been invested by ID advocates in the "irreducibly complexity" concept for them to recognize its significance (assuming it ever had any, given its recurrent reformulations) has essentially collapsed.

Well, in a follow-up, on the same page, Ms. Bottero notes that Behe has behaved pretty much as predicted.

Dr. Behe claims that the only evidence that would convince him of the evolution of an IC system consists not only of a complete step-by-step list of mutations,

... but also a detailed account of the selective pressures that would be operating, the difficulties such changes would cause for the organism, the expected time scale over which the changes would be expected to occur, the likely population sizes available in the relevant ancestral species at each step, other potential ways to solve the problem which might interfere, and much more.

Calvin and Hobbes are alive and well in Darwinland

Funny thing is, Behe has not required anywhere near this level of evidence elsewhere:

Dr. Behe has no problem at all with Darwinian explanations as they apply to other, not irreducibly complex systems. For instance, Behe accepts that hemoglobin (the protein complex that carries oxygen in red blood cells) evolved from myoglobin (the protein that stores oxygen within muscle fibers).

I doubt he has an account of the complete evolutionary/mutational history of this transition, though.

To look at this demand another way, Behe's standard of proof is equivalent to some bureaucrat demanding eyewitness accounts of every moment of Michael Behe's life from birth until the present time before assenting to the theory that Michael Behe today is the same individual who emerged from the womb of Mrs. Behe lo these many years ago. (After all, he might be a ringer, having assumed the identity of someone who died in childbirth.) Or an Intelligent Designer may have replaced the real Michael Behe with a replica, changeling style, when no one was looking.

Michael Behe and his associates cater to a public which craves certainty and eternal answers. Unfortunately, science is not the place to look.

...the difference between the ID view of science, and what science actually is. ID is about absolute philosophical claims -- it does not, cannot cope with the fact that science is a process. As a political movement, ID has no time to let science take its course -- it must provide an ideologically satisfying answer right away, for its fund-raisers and activists, and defend it to the end. That is why scientists put their efforts into collecting data bit by bit, and ID advocates put theirs in revising definitions and raising the evidence bar to protect their claims from the new scientific data.