I think I'm liking the Kitzmiller case.

Not only is it looking like the creationist side is going to go down hard, but it's also accomplishing something very useful: it's exposing the incompetence, hypocrisy, and pariah status of one of the current Icons of Intelligent Design, Michael Behe. He's a guy the Discovery Institute loves to trot out as a star of their show. He has a Ph.D. in biochemistry! He's a professor at a respectable university! He published articles in real scientific journals! He has published a bestselling book!

It's no wonder the DI peddled away from this trial as quickly as their tricycle would take them…Behe is getting eviscerated. And all the lawyers had to do was expose his own words.

Even the title of this article makes it clear: Backer of theory contradicted self, lawyer suggests.

Behe also said intelligent design does not maintain that life began abruptly, and does not specify God as the unidentified designer.

But plaintiffs' attorney Eric Rothschild produced documents, including Behe's own writings, that suggested otherwise.

Among the documents Rothschild highlighted in a PowerPoint presentation was an article in which Behe wrote that intelligent design is "much less plausible for those that deny God's existence."

True enough. I deny the existence of all gods, and I don't see any mechanism for his proposed explanation; Behe himself falls back on a god as the source of his design. Evolution, on the other hand, is independent of any beliefs in gods—an atheist like me has no problem with it, and neither do long lists of biologists who are also religious.

Behe has been caught dissembling. I think that's a no-no when testifying.

As for the idea that ID isn't about life beginning abruptly…

Rothschild also showed a section of the intelligent design book Of Pandas and People, in which Behe contributed a chapter and was listed as a "critical reviewer," stating that intelligent design means life forms "began abruptly."

Behe said under questioning that he did not agree with that definition of intelligent design.

What exactly does Behe think it means? He is an incredible waffler, who refuses to be pinned down on any specifics, except that he will loudly proclaim that no one has ever shown any evidence for the evolution of any biochemical pathway. He announces this at his talks, and the message is clear that evolution is not responsible for any cellular processes. So how does Dr Behe think the first cell appeared? I'd like to see him pinned down harder on this point.

Behe is definitely an outsider to science.

During cross-examination, Rothschild, of the law firm Pepper Hamilton in Philadelphia, produced documents indicating that intelligent design is rejected by the majority of scientific groups - as well as the biology faculty at Behe's own university.

He got to his current position by doing good work on histone molecular biology, but now he's gone off on a weird and untenable tack. Of course few in science accept his position.

Behe repeatedly compared intelligent design to the big bang theory, saying the big bang was rejected by mainstream scientists for decades before being accepted.

"Intelligent design is in the same category as the big bang," which took 30 years to become widely accepted by scientists, he said.

Hey, anybody else remember the big kerfluffle years ago when the Big-Bangists where struggling with the courts to get their theories into the high school textbooks, to the opposition of those intransigent Steady-Staters? Remember all the Supreme Court victories it took to get physicists to accept it? No? Hmmm, neither do I.

The article in the Inky was pretty good. The New York Times takes a stab at it, too, with mixed results. At least they start with a zinger.

A leading architect of the intelligent-design movement defended his ideas in a federal courtroom on Tuesday and acknowledged that under his definition of a scientific theory, astrology would fit as neatly as intelligent design.

Ouch. I'll be looking for the details of that one in the court transcripts, as soon as they are available. There is some wonderful ammo to use against these guys emerging from this trial.

Mike Argento has highlighted this amazing comment from Behe rather more effectively than has the New York Times.

In order to call intelligent design a "scientific theory," he had to change the definition of the term. It seemed the definition offered by the National Academy of Science, the largest and most prestigious organization of scientists in the Western world, was inadequate to contain the scope and splendor and just plain gee-willigerness of intelligent design.

So he devised his own definition of theory, expanding upon the definition of those stuck-in-the-21st-century scientists, those scientists who ridicule him and call his "theory" creationism in a cheap suit.

He'd show them. He'd come up with his own definition.

Details aside, his definition was broader and more inclusive of ideas that are "outside the box."

So, as we learned Tuesday, during Day 11 of the Dover Panda Trial, under his definition of a scientific theory, astrology would be a scientific theory.

(You know, I'm finding the York Daily Record a far better paper for the details of this trial than the NYT.)

But back to the NYT article. Look at this spectacular example of empty handwaving:

In an attempt to pin Professor Behe down, Mr. Rothschild asked, "What is the mechanism that intelligent design is proposing?"

Mr. Behe said: "It does not propose a mechanism in the sense of a step-by-step description of how these structures arose." He added that "the word 'mechanism' can be used broadly" and said the mechanism was "intelligent activity."

Mr. Rothschild concluded, "Sounds pretty tautological, Professor Behe."

"No, I don't think so," he responded. He likened the process to seeing the sphinx in Egypt, or the stone heads on Easter Island, and concluding that someone must have designed them.

Admission number one: ID does not propose a mechanism. He criticizes evolution for not having the step-by-step details of every single evolutionary event, but gives ID a pass, because it doesn't even propose anything. It's not just tautological, it's intellectually vacant.

Admission number two: All he's got is the "looks like" argument. This is such a tiresome excuse; he's playing to an audience of the credulous. Pointing to artifacts and saying that someone made it does not mean one can point to anything and say someone made it. Maybe a painting implies a painter, but rain does not imply a rainer.

Of course, this being from the New York Times, they have to pull on the clown shoes before they can publish the article, so it ends on this silly note.

Listening from the front row of the courtroom, a school board members said he found Professor Behe's testimony reaffirming. "Doesn't it sound like he knows what he's talking about?" said the Rev. Ed Rowand, a board member and church pastor. Mr. Rowand said the "core of the issue" is, "Do we have the academic freedom to tell our children there are other points of view besides Darwin's?"

A) It doesn't sound like he knows what he's talking about, and B) this isn't about silencing points of view, but affirming what are valid and justifiable scientific views that can be presented in a classroom as science.

I'll forgive the reporter that lapse into religious pandering, since the rest of the article did a good job of exposing Behe; I grant no such boon to CNN, for putting up a completely uncritical look at Behe. For all the grief I give the print media, the televised medium is even worse.

One last thing. While Behe is getting crucified in the courts and the press, don't expect this to stop him or his colleagues. The man has a serious persecution complex, and this will just fuel their need to be seen as an oppressed minority. Burt Humburg brought an interesting example to my attention. A while back, a letter Behe sent to a journal was rejected, and he did something unusual: he published the correspondence on the web. It's very strange, because the senior advisor to the editor who reviewed it tore it to pieces in no uncertain terms.

Metaphysicians who want science to speak out in favor of their beliefs, if not demonstrate them, are already put in a tight spot by the science of yesterday and have nothing to fear more than the science of tomorrow.

In this referee's judgment, the manuscript of Michael Behe does not contribute anything useful to evolutionary science. The arguments presented are weak.

Incidentally, publication in a scientific journal of this article could not be construed as anything resembling a First Amendment right. Naysayers such as Michael Behe have not been muzzled. They have repeatedly aired their point of view, and so be it.

The editor also chimed in on the rejection.

The editors have concluded that the journal should not undertake this project. The reasons are varied, but primarily they reduce to our general feeling that it is not possible to develop a meaningful discussion when the fundamental assumptions of the arguments are so different: on the one hand, the concept of intelligent design beyond the laws of nature is based on intuitive, philosophical, or religious grounds, while on the other, the study and explanation of all levels of the living world, including the molecular level, is based on scientific fact and inference.

This is the reason the IDists can't get published: weak arguments from metaphysics rather than evidence. Of course, Behe just blames it on dogmatic orthodoxy rather than the inadequacy of his own work.

The exchange was posted on the DI's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture website, but seems to have disappeared. You can still find it in the web archives if you look hard enough, and just to be sure, I've tucked a complete copy of the senior advisor's critique (which I don't entirely agree with, by the way) below the fold.

From an archive of articles on the Discovery Institute site:

Review of "Obstacles to gene duplication as an explanation for complex biochemical systems" by Michael Behe.

In the section "Meaning of explanation," the author harps on the extreme difficulty of elucidating complicated cellular interaction systems and of tracing the evolution of biological complexity. It is ironic that he should voice his concerns just as technical as well as conceptual progress has opened the door to investigating on a much larger scale than heretofore the mechanisms of development, and the increase in gene interaction complexity along certain lines of descent. Michael Behe is depicting a hopeless situation for the biological sciences, or at least for their evolutionary aspects, just as biology is proceeding through a glorious age.

A classical error of people who believe that complex gene interaction systems and other complex biological systems present an insuperable difficulty to evolutionary science is to imply that every component of the system has or has had only one function. In reality, every gene, or its ancestors, or its duplicated brothers and cousins, or all of these, usually exert multiple functions and can be re-mobilized for building up new complex systems or can be dropped from a complex system without being dropped from the functioning genome. The function of the system itself may change (an oft quoted morphological example: folds that act as gliders related to wings); intermediate stages function differently from the terminal stage considered, but do function, indeed. If evolutionary pathways were difficult to find, nature faced these difficulties and solved them. The scientist's job is just to follow nature, and that he believes he can do.

It is interesting to show--Behe examines this claim--that by knocking two genes out of this cascade, the resulting organisms are less abnormal than those that have lost only one of two genes. Yet, it is by no means necessary to be able to provide such a demonstration. Not being able to provide it does not authorize anyone to consider the system as "irreducibly" complex, in Behe's metaphysical sense of irreducible.

On the other hand, the mutational acquisition of modified or new functions by duplicated genes has been witnessed many times by sequence comparisons and other approaches, and there is no trace of an "irreducible" difficulty here either, despite Behe's claims.

This reviewer is no authority on the blood clotting cascade, but if a plausible model for its evolutionary development, compatible with all known facts, has indeed not been generated so far, the remaining question marks are not threat to science--on the contrary, they are a challenge added to thousands of other challenges that science met and meets. In this instance, too, science will be successful.

Is that too bold a prediction? On the contrary, it is not bold. If science, in the modern sense of the word (defined by its method), were only just beginning its career, onlookers would naturally be divided into optimists and pessimists. But, as young as science still is, its accomplishments have verified over and over again that the world of the observable and the measurable is understandable in terms of the observed and measured. Pessimism in this respect has come to lack intellectual status.

In the face of this evidence, Dr. Behe's stance is quasi-heroic, but it is heroism at the service of a lost and mistaken cause. He is not deterred by the fact that molecular biology is only about 50 years old, that during this period it has generated an almost overwhelming amount of fundamental understanding, that more understanding is obviously on its way; further, that the study of the molecular bases of development had to wait for its turn: it was able to take off seriously only within the last decade. All of these studies will be amplified if there is peace in the world, and many biological problems that Dr. Behe today uses as drums to proclaim his faith will be solved in ways that cannot be but disappointing to him.

The trust expressed by the present referee is based on the lessons of several hundred years of history of science. It is really a very short history judged in terms of human history in general, and, considering the recorded accomplishments, it takes a fair amount of intellectual "chuzpah" to reproach science for the understanding that it has not yet achieved.

This reviewer thinks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding around the role of intelligence in the world. The world itself, through the interactions that take place under the reign of natural law, manifests a sort of intelligence--an intelligence much greater than our intelligence--out of which our intelligence has very likely arisen as a product. No wonder, then, that, to our intelligence, the universe appears intelligent: there is a close kinship between the universe and our mind--as one would expect, since our intelligence is shaped so as to permit us to get along in the world. (". . . So as to permit us . . .": language often induces us to seem to express the presence of an intent when none is implied; none is here.) Consistently to use the phrase "intelligent design" instead of God is almost cheating, since this use has an ambiguous relation to the presence in the universe of a sort of intelligence that, except perhaps in a pantheistic sense if one wishes to think so, has no implication regarding the existence of a God. God, here, stands for a being that combines consciousness, will, and universal power.

Of course science has its limits, but they are surely not where Behe places them; they are not, indeed, in the realm of biological evolution. The perception of science's limits will evolve as science itself evolves, and the limits won't furnish an argument in favor of intelligent design in the sense of a design imagines by a universal "person." The argument will be in favor of the finiteness of the analytical powers of the human mind. The limits of science will probably be recognized as being, in part, imposed by the position in the universe of the intelligent (human) observer. Whatever God's role in the universe, if any, biology will be understood without reference to him. That is implied by the essence of science.

Behe wants to be able to say that this is not so, and he needs to say it very quickly, because every day any conceivable ground for making his statement shrinks further. The faith of scientists is that the world of phenomena can be understood, and that the transformations of this world leading up to the present state of affairs can be understood. Developments conform every day that, progressively, scientists are winning this bet. Whatever is discovered, the most surprising as well as the less surprising, will be part of nature: the supernatural has no place in the observable and measurable.

Metaphysicians who want science to speak out in favor of their beliefs, if not demonstrate them, are already put in a tight spot by the science of yesterday and have nothing to fear more than the science of tomorrow.

In this referee's judgment, the manuscript of Michael Behe does not contribute anything useful to evolutionary science. The arguments presented are weak.

Incidentally, publication in a scientific journal of this article could not be construed as anything resembling a First Amendment right. Naysayers such as Michael Behe have not been muzzled. They have repeatedly aired their point of view, and so be it.

If Behe were right in spite of all, it would become apparent in due time through failures of science. It would be very much out of place to denounce such failures now, since they have not occurred. Having not yet understood all of biology is not a failure after just 200 years, given the amount of understanding already achieved. Let us speak about it again in 1000 years. Meanwhile, metaphysicians should spare scientists their metaphysics and just let the scientists do their work--or join them in doing it.

(In case anyone is wondering what I object to in the above, I find the Argument from Scientific Triumphalism a little off-putting. I know there will be many things that will not be explained in my lifetime, and also many things that will not be explained in a thousand years; we can't expect the critics to say nothing until we're done talking, because scientists are never going to shut up.)