••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

junk chemistry

michael behe, lehigh u biochem prof, author of darwin's black box, and star witness in favor of "intelligent" design [ID] at the dover pa monkey trial, appeared on washington journal yesterday morning.

on the surface, his arguments sound sensible.

referring to the "enormous complexity in the cell" he said
we start with that and we say what's the best explanation for this elegant and sophisticated machinery that we find in life? and in our experience, whenever we see such sophistication and such functional integrity, we have always found it to be the result of purposeful design.
then he spoke about falsification, which is an essential element of a scientific theory:
intelligent design...can be falsified: ...if it could be shown that some sophisticated molecular machine such as we find in the cell could be produced by random mutation and natural selection, then that would show that intelligence was not necessary to produce it. so all one has to do is for a scientist to go into his lab and show that darwin's mechanism—random mutation and natural selection—can do what has been claimed for it. ...on the other hand...it's real difficult to falsify the darwin claim that random mutation and natural selection can account for the complexity that we've found in life....
let me take that last quote first because i can handle it so quickly. all i have to do is move the word "not": change "could be produced by random mutation and natural selection" to "could not be produced by..." and "intelligence was not necessary" to "intelligence was necessary."

in other words, he's saying "all one has to do" to falsify ID is prove evolution. if he can do that, so can i, the other way round.

as for the first argument, i say: bullshit! you've never, in your alleged "experience" seen "such sophistication and such functional integrity" except in living things. the most complex machine humans ever made comes nowhere near the complexity of dna. you say it must be designed? i say only billions of years of randomness can account for it.

and if you really think randomness can't produce complexity, how do you explain snowflakes? how do you explain fractals found in noise? haven't you ever played minesweeper?

[previous entertaining & enlightening posts on this topic: 7/29, 8/10, 8/30, 8/31, 9/1, 10/1, 11/10, 11/14]

btw, darwin's great-great-grandson, matthew chapman, came on the show after behe. one of the many interesting ideas he threw out was that most complex inventions are designed by teams, not by one person. monotheists who find ID comforting: take note!

No comments:

Post a Comment