Behe's talk at the MacLaurin Institute ("Bringing God into the marketplace of ideas by communicating the Christian worldview with its transforming potential") last night exceeded my expectations of suckiness. It was an evening of phony rhetoric, smug self-aggrandizement, and utter vacuity—and the audience of complacent Christians ate it up. That part of the audience that consisted of atheists and competent scientists and, I presume, honest Christians found it appalling.

I won't try to do a full blow-by-blow here; it's the same tired schtick Behe has been doing for ten years, right down to the same lame jokes, so it's too boring to repeat. I'll just break it down into his major themes.

"Machines, machines, machines." There was no actual data presented anywhere in this talk. The core of it was an extended logical fallacy, nothing more, repeating the "machine" mantra of his NY Times op-ed and quote-mining respected biologists like Dawkins and Alberts.

His game begins with Mt. Rushmore. Look at Mt. Rushmore; it's complicated and contains specific, recognizable forms; therefore it is designed. This is the key first step in his rhetoric, getting the audience to agree that because something looks designed, therefore it was designed. Of course, he's glossing over the fact that we also know that Gutzon Borglum hit that mountain with dynamite and jackhammers, and that the mountain is shaped in specific ways that other mountains in our experience are not, and that it has been given a detailed resemblance to specific organic forms with which we are familiar…we have evidence that it was designed and built by an intelligent agent. That wouldn't serve his purpose, though, so he plays the game of claiming we know it is designed just by looking at it.

Then he throws out a picture of a bacterial flagellum, and claims that because it looks complicated and machine-like, it is therefore designed. One big problem: knowing that one complicated thing (Mt. Rushmore) is designed does not mean that every complicated thing is designed. He has not established the premise of his argument.

He went on and on with the misleading comparisons, talking of the cell as filled with highways and trucks and factories and all kinds of machines, and quoting Dawkins and Alberts as using the word "machines". To Behe, machines must be the product of purposeful design, and therefore every time Richard Dawkins uses the word "machine", he is validating Behe. This is dishonest nonsense, of course—he is loading his use of the word "machine" with a bunch of rhetorical baggage that Dawkins and Alberts are not. His audience of religious fans, though, share that baggage so it sails through without a complaint.

"I'm smarter than Russ Doolittle." Much of his talk was taken up with smarmy pats on his own back over Russ Doolittle. Doolittle did muddle up some comments on an experiment on the blood clotting pathway, but Behe used some sloppy wording to ride roughshod over the experiment itself. This gaffe is explained in much detail at the Panda's Thumb, so I'll just give the short version.

Behe has described his concept of irreducible complexity operationally as, "If a part is missing, the system wouldn't work at all"—there are no degrees of functionality, it is intolerant of damage and simply collapses. He has said the blood clotting system is irreducibly complex. A series of experiments, in which two factors in the blood clotting system, fibrinogen and plasminogen, were mutated, show some difficulties with that idea: fibrinogen deficient mice have problems, a propensity for bleeding (as might expected), but the surprising thing is that they survive quite well in the lab. Plasminogen deficient mice have more serious problems, but a further surprise: double mutants, mice lacking both fibrinogen and plasminogen, look like the fibrinogen deficient mice—relatively normal superficially, but with a compromised clotting system that doesn't work as well.

Behe practically crowed in triumph as he showed a partial quote from Russ Doolittle that said the fibrinogen deficient mice were "normal", and showed lists of things that were wrong in their phenotype; he claimed that Doolittle had completely misread the paper, and oooh, but isn't Mike Behe a clever one for catching a bigshot in a goof? I tried to ask a question of Behe on this at the end. Unfortunately, I wasn't asked, but I did confront him after the talk on this one. Here's a paraphrase of the conversation:

Hmmm. Maybe Doolittle's wording wasn't such a mistake after all. I also pointed out that the quote from Doolittle that he put up there was incomplete, and that after the part where he said the mice were normal, he qualified it by saying,

No one doubts that mice deprived of these two genes would be compromised in the wild, but the mere fact that they appear normal in the laboratory setting is a striking example of the point and counterpoint, step-by-step scenario in reverse!

Behe denied knowing anything about that, and said his quotation was complete and not at all misleading.

I reminded him of his own definition of irreducible complexity: "If a part is missing, the system wouldn't work at all". These mice were clearly alive, superficially indistinguishable from wild type mice, and seemed to be "working" quite well. Doesn't that point, which he glossed over completely in order to gloat over a contrived misreading of Doolittle, mean the clotting system isn't IC after all?

Behe then did the same thing he has always done when confronted with these kinds of data…he ducked and moved the goalposts. The pathway is broken, therefore it is still irreducibly complex. I explained that that was irrelevant, all evolution would care about is the viability of the organism, and that what these kinds of experiments show is a partial reduction in health, not the absolute eradication his definition demands, but he just waffled about pathways and molecules again. He looked very nervous, though, and I think he was aware that he was on shaky ground. (Dave Puskala, who was there, said Behe looked uncomfortable, and allows that I handed him his ass.)

"What hypothesis?" While I had him on the ropes, I asked him another question, one that was key to his whole approach. I pointed out that his entire seminar consisted of trashing evolutionary theory, claiming it couldn't happen, etc., yet the title of his talk was "Toward an Intelligent Understanding of the Intelligent Design Hypothesis". What was his specific, testable hypothesis for the origin of the blood clotting system? His answer: "It was designed." I hammered a little harder, and said that was neither specific nor testable—when, where, how was it designed? How would I test it or find evidence for it? He mumbled something very peculiar…"That's about origins. We don't speculate about origins."

In other words, he's got nothin'.

Behe talked for an hour, and in all that time he didn't give one specific hypothesis, he didn't describe any evidence, and he didn't propose one single line of research that an ID-friendly scientist could follow. This was a completely empty talk, a hollow shell with a few buzzwords and fallacious analogies to make his cheerleaders happy. He's a fraud.

I can't say that it was an entirely wasted evening, though. I learned that Intelligent Design creationism is still dead in the water, and that one of the few legitimately credentialed scientists working within the movement is still an empty babbler without a whisper of scientific support; the most amusing part of the talk was his opening line, when he gave a disclaimer that the provost of his university wanted him to say, that his views do not represent Lehigh University.

Before the talk, I also spent several pleasant hours conversing with Mike Mosedale of the City Pages. I might have an interview appearing there sometime in the near future. Mike seemed like a nice fellow, so I don't think it will be a hatchet job (although that might be much more exciting than an interview with a mild-mannered nerd.)

After the talk, I got to visit with August Berkshire, Kristine Harley, Eva Young, and Dave Puskala (who gave me several bottles of his homebrew…that alone was enough to make the long drive and the tedious lecture worth it) at an informal meeting of the Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists. It's too bad that it takes the threat of dishonest dreck from a creationist to drag me out to Minneapolis.