Behe Jones: The Wedge of Evolution

September 25th, 2007 Jemmy Button Posted in News |

RUTHLESSLY PERSECUTED by the jack-booted Thought Police of the Darwintern, who ceaselessly conspire to suppress the publication of leading-edge alchemy, New Age astrology, and post-modernist Intelligent Design in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the Discovery Institute valiantly battles on to bring the TRVTH before the general public in easy to digest layman books and, in a new venture, movies for the hard-of-thinking. We understand Hollywood is keenly interested in Dr. Michael Behe’s new tome, The Edge of Evolution, which will hopefully be finding its way to a theatre near you soon:

True, the reviews of the book itself were disappointing (links available from the NCSE at Behe’s latest scrutinized), but Robert Crowther has boldly stepped into the breach with some glowing commentary in his piece on the DI’s blog, California Literary Review Interviews Michael Behe on The Edge of Evolution. Mr. Crowther usefully provides a link to the original article, and quotes Dr. Behe from therein:

Whenever we perceive a “purposeful arrangement of parts” we suspect design. The more parts there are, and the more clearly they fit the purpose, the more confident our conclusion of design becomes. In the past fifty years science has discovered a very purposeful arrangement of parts in the cell’s molecular machinery. That is the evidence for the involvement of a designer in life on earth.

Ahh, the reassuringly-familiar ’same old same old’. But even the Discovery Institute itself appears to have given up their claims that ID represents genuine science in favour of ever more desperate plaints that they are victims of ‘persecution’ by ubiquitous “Darwinists.” Dr. Behe himself touches on this in the interview:

Q: Have you published this theory in a peer-reviewed journal? Have other scientists put forth a challenge to this quantitative argument?

A: No, no journal these days would touch a paper which investigates intelligent design with a ten foot pole (unless the paper aims to debunk ID).

In other words, “Mom, those nasty scientists won’t play with me!” It takes tough love to point out here that the ridicule ID attracts arises, not from some mad lust in scientists to persecute, but simply because ID has been repeatedly demonstrated to be groundless, and its continual promotion (by the lawyers, publicists, and religious apologists of the Discovery Institute) is, simply, ridiculous.

And unfortunately, there was no room in Mr. Crowther’s DI blog for any further quotes from Dr. Behe, such as the following from the same source:

I clearly state that random evolution works well up to the species level, perhaps to the genus and family level too. But at the level of vertebrate classes (birds, fish, etc), the molecular developmental programs needed would be beyond the edge of evolution. Darwinian evolution works well when a single small change in an organism’s DNA produces a notable effect. That’s what happens to give the various breeds of dogs. But when multiple, coordinated changes are needed for an effect, chance mutation loses its power.

In other words, we’re going to get God – oops, excuse me, the Intelligent Designer – in there somehow or other, you’ll see, as promised in the original “Wedge” manifesto. How else is one to account for Dr. Behe’s persistent misrepresentation of natural selection as random?

And of course, for Dr. Behe’s argument it’s a tad inconvenient (as my Brother in Pondscum, Ichneumon, has noted) that back in the early Cambrian, or a bit before, the difference between the chordates (including the vertebrates) and many of the non-chordates would have been of the amount that Behe concedes is possible for evolution to produce between related species. And it’s a bit embarrassing to confess that today, 540+ million years later, their descendants have diversified to the point that the chordates are categorised into their own phylum, separate from the phyla that various non-chordates are grouped into. But Dr. Behe’s The Edge of Evolution isn’t meant for the sort of folks who notice that kind of thing.

In any event, the movie should be a winner, and we’d like to suggest the following synopsis for the screenwriters to work from:

At long last Behe Jones (played by Ben Stein) — a 50-something, self-promoting, publicity-minded, genetic-mutation-counting biochemist — has found scientific bliss. For six glorious weeks, he has been the advocate of the exquisitely flawless human origins theorist Chuck D’Arwin (Colin Firth) and nothing could be better…

Or — could it? Despite D’Arwin’s apparent triumph, Behe still finds himself asking questions about life, love and the irreducible complexity of a mousetrap. Having finally found his man, Behe is faced with the challenge of understanding his work. He can’t help but wonder: how exactly do you evolve a bacterial flagellum?

And just as he’s starting to figure it all out, enter the competition: D’Arwin’s drop-dead gorgeous, flagellum-up-to-there, never-says-a-different-thing new challenger. Suddenly jealousy, uncertainty and temptation — in the form of Behe’s fellow Discovery Institute associate and Christian Apologist heartthrob Bill Dembski (Hugh Grant) — threaten to upend Behe’s dream in a comic maze of bad advice, silly mix-ups and total disasters that could only happen to him!

This hypothetical pre-publicity has been brought to you by Darwin Central, the Conspiracy that Cares.