Michael Behe: malignant metastasizing metaphors!
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Pirate modeWhat is wrong with Behe? This interview in the Christian Post contains one of the most illogical, stupid, idiotic excuses for the Intelligent Design hypothesis I've read yet. The writer asks a simple question, one I'd like to see answered by the IDists, but Behe's answer is simply pathetic.
Do you see ID having enough evidence?
Yes, I certainly do. Well, I am a biochemist and biochemistry studies molecular basis of life. And in the past 50 years, science has discovered that at the very foundation of life there are sophisticated molecular machines, which do the work in the cell. I mean, literally, there are real machines inside everybody’s cells and this is what they are called by all biologists who work in the field, molecular machines. They’re little trucks and busses that run around the cell that takes supplies from one end of the cell to the other. They’re little traffic signals to regulate the flow. They’re sign posts to tell them when they get to the right destination. They’re little outboard motors that allow some cells to swim. If you look at the parts of these, they’re remarkably like the machineries that we use in our everyday world.
The argument is that we know from experience that machinery in our everyday world that we use in our everyday world required design, required an intelligent agent that put it together, who understood how it was going to be used and who assembled the parts. By an inductive argument, when we find such sophisticated machinery in other places too, we can conclude that it also requires design. So now that we found it in life and in the very foundation of life, I and other ID advocates argue that there is no reason to not reach the same conclusion and that in fact, these things were indeed designed.
Seriously. This is the best the man can do? He's asked for the evidence, and what does he give us? Irrelevant word games ("scientists call 'em 'machines'!"), and asinine metaphors. Calling cytoskeletal transport proteins "trucks and busses" does not make them so. If I call Michael Behe bird-brained, it does not mean I think he has feathers and can fly; it especially does not mean he should jump off a tall building, confident in his avian abilities.
And no, if you look closely at them, they are nothing like the machineries with which we are familiar. When scientists call them machines and pumps and signals and motors, they are making broad but severely limited analogies in order to communicate their function to other human beings who are familiar with machines and pumps and signals and motors. They are not trying to imply that Ford has the contract to manufacture annexins for the phylum Chordata, or that there are little winking green, yellow, and red lights in the cell. Most importantly, there is no intent to imply designers.
One other interesting omission in the article: nowhere does Behe even mention "irreducible complexity". I guess that's one concept the IDiots have learned belongs on the junkheap, yet it's the one thing that made Behe famous.
Obviously Mike needs to learn about language even more than he needs to learn about evolution.