|
| 阅读上一个主题 :: 阅读下一个主题 |
| 作者 |
 Behe’s Irreducible complexity went to court, II |
 |
唐好色
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2006/03/20
文章: 3893
经验值: 67892
|
|
|
作者：唐好色 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Let me begin with a link for the background:
http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/intelligentdesigncase/dovertrialtranscripts.htm
To people who do not enjoy court room dramas and do not wish to wade through over a thousand pages of testimony, much of which concern the legal issues, I give a brief summary of the key scientific issues of the case.
Essentially, prof. Behe a biochemist from Lehigh U. proposed/popularized a hypothesis in biology among certain sects of Christians that certain vital and complex biological systems consist of various parts and any subset of such a system is useless. Hence a subset of the system offers no evolutionary advantage until all parts are in place—This is what he meant by “irreducible”. The conclusion is that it is not possible statistically for these complex biological systems to rise through evolutionary pathways over time.
Unlike philosophers who, after debating beauty and truth and dialectics, just go to lunch, scientists must offer testable hypothesis and Behe offered three: 1. a subsequence of the blood clotting cascade. 2. Bacterial flagellum. 3. Immune systems. He also offered a computer simulation of mutations of prokaryotes genes.
It turns out that none of the first two systems are irreducible: 1. whales, dolphins and puffer fish do not have the complete subsequence and their blood still clots. 2. the bacterial flagellum does have a functional subset called type III secretory system. In other words, it is again not irreducible. In the third case of immune system, Behe didn’t even identify a particular irreducible system and just claimed that it is so complex that it was impossible to have developed through evolution. Finally, his computer simulation of prokaryotes genes was so simplistic as to the point of irrelevance. It is asexual, does not consider recombination, insertion/deletion and transposition. Even there, his conclusion was inconclusive at best when the lawyer pointed out that there are 10^16 prokaryotes in a ton of soil and it just takes a few years to reach a substantial probability of forming the supposedly irreducible system.
In the end, when pressed, Behe said that it is just intuitive that the odds are too staggering for these systems to form without outside intervention. Well, prof. Behe, the geocentric model is also far more intuitive to the human mind than the heliocentric model, but is also wrong.
Some interesting anecdotes: When Behe was informed of the fact that bacterial flagellum is not irreducible, he got testy and insisted on bacterial flagellum still being irreducible because, he said: “the type III secretory system does not function as flagellum”. As one can see, this makes no sense. It also turns out that one of the referees who made the crucial recommendation to publish Behe’s “Darwin’s black box” was a Christian. The referee later admitted that he never read the book and made his recommendation after a 10 minute phone conversation with the editor.
作者：唐好色 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
|
|
| 返回顶端 |
|
 |
| |
|
|
您不能在本论坛发表新主题
您不能在本论坛回复主题
您不能在本论坛编辑自己的文章
您不能在本论坛删除自己的文章
您不能在本论坛发表投票
您不能在这个论坛添加附件
您不能在这个论坛下载文件
|
based on phpbb, All rights reserved.
|
