© Discovery InstituteMichael Behe, a scene from Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines.
The new science he covers in this book shows that Darwin's theory can explain some changes, but quickly breaks down. DNA sequencing has only been available in the past decade or two. Its findings show that when organisms change, they do it almost always by breaking genes, not by making new ones. So in general, the evidence shows that when species evolve, they're really devolving. And that devolution prevents future evolution.
Evolution (Unguided) Breaks Things
Behe defines his terms carefully. Evolution, in particular, means many different things. On one level, it simply says things change over time. No controversy there. On another level, it's a theory of common descent, saying that all organisms came by something like a branching tree from one common ancestor. But classic evolutionary theory also claims that this common descent, and all the adaptations of life, happened by an unguided process: natural selection sifting random variations. This, Behe says, flatly conflicts with the evidence.
Past critics of his work, including also his 2008 work The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, have assailed it as "religiously motivated." Behe certainly defends intelligent design, the theory that much if not all of nature is best explained as the product of a purposeful Mind. He didn't go there, though, until he read an early work on evolution by Michael Denton. That led him to realize he'd never asked evolution the hard questions.
Now with new findings from genetics, the questions are harder than ever. Experiments show that even adaptive changes - changes that seem like improvements - almost always come by way of breaking genes. In a recent podcast, Behe likened it to a car for whom gas mileage suddenly became its most important feature. (Full disclosure: I work with the Discovery Institute in helping produce the ID the Future podcast). The mileage problem is easy for cars, actually. Just remove some of its seats. In organisms this principle works, for example, when a gene that's been holding back an existing capability gets damaged. That capability then shows up. It's not a new capability, just newly expressed.
It Only Makes Sense: Breaking Things Is Easier
It makes sense, really. It's a whole lot easier to break a thing than it is to make one. Ask the poor nursery owner who thought I could help him one summer removing an old building and building a new one. I lasted there as long as the job was only about tearing things down.
Not only that, but once nature finds a way to improve a function work by degrading a gene, nature is happy with that. It'll spread that new answer throughout a population just as fast as Darwin ever supposed. That's what natural selection does: It preserves helpful (adaptive) changes and spreads them around while letting less lucky populations die away. Once nature is happy with one quick answer produced by breaking things, though, it's not going to hang around waiting for another, more elaborate answer produced by making things.
Misdirected and Unsupported Criticism
I'm oversimplifying, obviously, trying to summarize in a few words what Behe details over some 300 highly readable pages. I'm sure critics will find things not to like about my summary. And why not? Critics took Behe's earlier work to task, and yet never with any substance. Darwin's Black Box was vilified, even by Behe's colleagues at Lehigh. As he shows in an appendix to Darwin Devolves, though, no one has ever refuted its arguments. Not even close.
The most emphatic reactions comes from critics who can't stomach the idea that God had anything to do with life's origin and development. Behe quotes philosopher John Searle as saying the whole idea of a greater mind behind nature "does not fit in and seems intellectually repulsive." Which is a lot like saying, "I don't like the taste of it, therefore it isn't science." (See the book's website for up-to-the-minute discussion on criticisms and responses.)
This book is built on solid science. It's going to be harder than ever for critics to spit it out just because they don't like its taste. It will also be hard for critics to ignore the conclusion Behe reaches in his final chapter. Materialists, those who deny the larger reality of mind, typically end up denying even the human reality of mind. The world only makes sense if we see it as the product of a great, purposeful, highly intelligent designing Mind.
Reader Comments
It means no such thing, and this misuse of the word is at the heart of the controversy.
Webster:
evolution; an unrolling or opening < evolutus, pp. of evolvere: see EVOLVE
1 an unfolding, opening out, or working out; process of development, as from a simple to a complex form, or of gradual, progressive change
Key to the meaning of evolve is DEVELOP and PROGRESSIVE. To know such quality exists either requires a priori knowledge of the process, or the ability to look ahead and predict the changes based on previous behavior.
Adaption is not evolution, and Nature would have to be the intelligence in the design if "...once nature finds a way to improve a function..." were a true statement. We used to call the notion that Nature deliberately caused catastrophe or blessedness, superstition.
Devolution, or more appropriately, entropy has been the observed quality of the universe. Halton Arp showed this with the birth and death of galaxies.
But entropy is a funny thing... Without it, there is no change, no movement. Even evolution includes entropy, as does creation and destruction of galaxies. But despite that, things get created that are ordered to some extent.
ID is wrongly saying that entropy means devolution. The only way you can prove an idea of no entropy is to think about absolute zero. In that case, it sounds very familiar to where every religion seeks to return to heaven, nirvana, etc... The source of zero... Or the time before the big bang. After all, if I had some creator that designed me to be this way, I never really had free will. Maybe those people are choosing to believe that they too never had free will by giving away what is, to an idea that it was all planned.
The time before the big bang???...What time?,..What big bang?,.....The materialistic, 3rd Density perception of such is really erroneous, to say the least. Beings who are reductionist, and materialistic, with very limited view of 'the field', who are stuck in a reality of beginnings and endings, will never get anywhere in this field, as is apparent. When a leaf falls to the ground, does that signal the 'end' of the tree?. Freewill? What makes you think you have freewill? This question doesn't rule out the possibility of freewill, just that it is a distant possibility for many. Freewill and willful are very different, big difference! Another point is, how can freewill exist without intelligence? Quite contrary, if i must say. The last point is, maybe the universe is open!
But the deal is this... ID is saying in essence that nature would not have come into this order without intelligence, right? What I'm saying is that nature developed intelligence because there is entropy.
What the article is saying is that so-called evolution is the result of breaking genes, not the emergence of new ones. The resulting breaking, allows the expression of genes that were hitherto unexpressed. There would? Not quite sure how you arrive at that. Can you elaborate further? Creation exists, as does entropy. How can nature develop intelligence because of entropy, without factoring in creation? That doesn't make sense.
The problem is that because of that, there is this aversion to properly questioning things. Instead, we have Behe saying things about entropy that are wrong but validate his belief system. You can't fill a cup that is already filled. It takes that taste of what was already in the cup.
Perhaps then, i will understand what you are saying.
Intelligent Design = Creationism = traditional organized religion. If over-simplistic, I'm open to hearing more, like other non-religious Intelligence or Design involved in life on earth.
The theory and purpose of science is learning what stuff is and how it works. Any authoritarianism in science just slows down the process but doesn't stop it. The involvement of psychopaths in everything cannot disqualify those things or we'd have nothing to do or talk about.
The number of articles about a topic doesn't logically speak to the accuracy of the views expressed as we witness daily everywhere. While numerous publications and 'fact-check' websites absolved the Clintons et al of any wrongdoing with the Uranium One and other pay-to-play schemes, it's something that has not been fully investigated AFAIK.
Surely 'science' has considered consciousness [Link] spirituality [Link] , and the like. There were studies about whether prayer helped sick people, for instance. It also has connected religious experiences and belief to brain activity. Truly, all we 'know' is perception as interpreted by the brain.
It's uncomfortable to have profound unknowns and mysteries, but that's always been the human condition, and it will continue for some time; how we deal with it is the question.
Absolute zero
First one is, what does entropy in the grand scheme of things, what is its function. How does it fit in the universal scheme of things?
The reality of the situation is that psychopaths have infiltrated religion, science, and just about everything else. That greatly influences what comes down the pike, and has done for a long time. Science has been stifled and rendered 'smart, but useless' for the best part. Hence, the reference to the many articles pointing this out!
We don't know what entropy is intended for, it just is. Every reaction contributes to entropy. Even random number generators use a "guess" of entropy in order to come up with unique numbers. So I would say that entropy allows for uniqueness!
Check it out for an explanation of these terms.