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Friday, May 27, 2005

Michael Behe: malignant metastasizing metaphors!

What 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.


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Comments:
#26470: — 05/28  at  02:57 PM
Poor Behe. He uses a metaphor appropriate to his (mostly uneducated) audience, and all the atheists here take him literally, while the literalist fundies know he's talking in metaphor. The irony is delicious.

FWIW, my advisor was interviewed on NPR for some nuclear magnetic resonance work. He was told that he mustn't say "quantum" or "nuclear" on the radio, because people will either zone out or go ballistic, or both. Now if you have to dumb it down for *NPR*, imagine the audience for Christian Post. And remember you have to get your message past the reporter, whose vocabulary might not go much above "stop sign."



#26472: murky — 05/28  at  03:07 PM
AC: To use an analogy, this is like what the NRA says about guns. Metaphors aren't stupid. People are stupid. In this case the person is Behe.



#26473: — 05/28  at  03:11 PM
Well you must not be capable of reading literally in any sense of the word, Coward. Behe wrote:

I mean, literally, there are real machines inside everybody’s cells...


Since you can't understand the word "literally", I think that you must be a creationist or IDist, indeed.



#26478: — 05/28  at  03:25 PM
No, no "literally" should be understod metaphorical.



#26489: — 05/28  at  06:10 PM
GD wrote:

Well you must not be capable of reading literally in any sense of the word, Coward. Behe wrote: "I mean, literally, there are real machines inside everybody’s cells..."


Sigh. Machine = mechanism. Behe's quote said, "molecular machines," and indeed, there are molecular machines within each cell, and they've been referred to that way for roughly a century. So Behe was correct to say "literally," unless you insist on interpreting machines = chainsaws.

A straw man, a misquote, and an ad hominem in just two sentences... the fundies across the street couldn't have done better. Apparently Pharyngula isn't the place for rational argument. Don't worry, I won't darken your doorstep again. Meanwhile, if you want your science taken seriously, learn a thing or two about fallacies, e.g.,
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/index.html



#26490: murky — 05/28  at  06:17 PM
I heard that people who believe in ID drink the blood of children. Anybody ever hear anything to the contrary?



's avatar #26492: PZ Myers — 05/28  at  06:29 PM
All well and good, they have been referred to as machines...but the problem is that Behe then uses that word to imply that they are literally designed artifacts, like chainsaws. Behe was not correct.

Note this critical step in his logic:
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.
You are committing the same logical error he is. You don't get to say that he's not trying to claim they are machines like chainsaws, and at the same time claim that because chainsaws are designed, these molecular machines are designed.

PZ Myers
Division of Science and Math
University of Minnesota, Morris



#26541: — 05/29  at  02:08 PM
A straw man, a misquote, and an ad hominem in just two sentences... the fundies across the street couldn't have done better.


And you can't back up a single one of your lies, your bearing false witness. IDist indeed. Maybe even stupider than most.



#26562: — 05/29  at  06:38 PM
Charlie,
just reading through your article, where you state that Newton's law of gravity is based on an argument by analogy. This was something of a surprise to me; I don't remember Newton using any argument by analogy in Principia Mathematica last time I read it. Would you be good enough to point out where this is? I have always considered an argument by analogy to be fallacious.

Regards
Duncan



#26578: — 05/30  at  02:55 AM
Sigh. Machine = mechanism.

Wrong. Behe means machines = mechanisms that require design.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/composition.html

Well, there you go. Enjoy!



#26579: — 05/30  at  04:06 AM
For some reason "Behe means machines" is reminding me of the Beans means Heinz adverts. There's probably an ID jingle in there somewhere, eg: "A million IDiots every day, pick up a false analogy and say, 'Behe means machines'". The scansion could use some work though.

Meanwhile, is a can of beans irreducibly complex? After all, if you remove the can or the beans it no longer functions as a can of beans. Plus there are no functional half cans. Yet we know the transitional stages leading to the can of beans - and they don't go through naive half-cans. So even when designers are known, being irreducibly complex is irrelevant and the transitional fossils of different kinds are in evidence.



#26583: — 05/30  at  06:46 AM
a few comments late here but ...

Literally denotes in a strict or literal sense. It is a usage error to use this to mean in a figurative sense. Anyone who uses literally when they actually intended figuratively deserves being derides as an ignorant twit.
So Behe either has a problem with word usage that should have been corrected by HS at the latest, or is stating as a fact that cells contain nanometre-sized machines.



#26587: murky — 05/30  at  07:33 AM
I can see that this point about argument by analogy would be very hard to make to scientifically ignorant fundamentalist. Analogies are deep and mathematical in physics--e.g. between the longitudinal pressure waves in air that make sound and the transverse waves in the ocean that make surf and the probability waves that make quantum mechanics. You can make all kinds of predictions once you know something "is" (i.e. "literally") a wave. Similarly biology has homology--which you could almost translate as "literal analogy." One could talk about a mere phenomenological "analogy" between the whale fluke and the human hand--"just as human swimmers who push water with their hands, whales push water with their flukes"--but a biologist speaking of the likeness probably can't help but think of the much deeper evolutionary relationship between the fluke and the hand when he or she addresses their "analogy." So I think scientists tend to be careful with analogizing and take pains to say when they are speaking in metaphor, because to draw an analogy in science is to implicitly claim a deep and rigorously demonstrable connectedness. I think that's why PZ is shocked that Behe, who has a job in a university science department--ignores the distinction between metaphor and analogy. We know he's ignoring it, because we know alot about cars and a lot about biomacromolecules and we know the math and all kinds of other things about them are profoundly different. You might as well assert an analogy between DNA Polymerase and Jaques Chirac. The assertion is hollow and takes you nowhere.



#26651: Joe — 05/30  at  08:16 PM
Somebody should have Jeremy Paxman ask him that question 13 times.



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