posted
I found the ID response to the Dover trial rather interesting. Linkie. Bear in mind that professor Behe is the poster child for ID : He is a genuine scientist, or at any rate he was some time ago - he doesn't seem to have published anything lately. But certainly he understands real math and the scientific method, and has a genuine hard-science degree. And his objection to the mountain of evidence provided by the plaintiffs is, get this, that he didn't have time to read it! This is the man who is the foremost critic of 'the establishment' in biology, and yet he doesn't even manage to keep up with that part of the literature of the field that responds to his very own criticisms!?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Behe is from a very specialized field that only tangentially touches on issues related to evolutionary Biology. That's a been a problem right from the start, IMO. He claimed to have "special insights" to the problems in evolution without actually having much solid grounding in the field. It's why, for instance, he didn't know that people were already working out the evolutionary sequences of some of the things he thought couldn't possibly have evolved. There've been cases where the counter to his arguments has been published within weeks of his pronouncement of it being "irreducibly complex." Since publications take almost 2 years in the pipeline, that means that people had been working on the issue for a minimum of 3-5 years, and probably longer. Attendance at a conference or two would've probably clued Behe in. But if you hang out with people in your narrow speciality, you don't get the full picture.
Paradoxically, that phenomenon is what gave Behe's ideas some "legs" in the first go-round. Science often benefits from insights that come in from outside the narrow confines of a field. The "prepared mind" or "serendipity" phenomenon is an aspect of this. There's also just plain "borrowing" of insights or models from things that would seem to be "left field" and it sometimes works. Like evolution itself, however, people forget that most of these attempts are probably failures and we only remember the successes, because they stick around and get into text books.
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