PZ Myers. 2005 Dec 25. Behe: so wimpy, he's crushed by Alan Colmes. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/behe_so_wimpy_hes_crushed_by_alan_colmes/>. Accessed 2006 Mar 08.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Sunday, December 25, 2005
Behe: so wimpy, he's crushed by Alan Colmes
Immunoblogging links to the transcript of Behe on Hannity and Colmes. Whoa, but it's bad—Behe is a real broken record.*
LOWRY: So I know, again, it's going to get technical. But for the layman out there, give us an example of something in biology that is comparable to Mount Rushmore.
First, let me tell you something: in a conversation with Behe, it never gets technical. He's always superficial, he's always making this tiresome argument by analogy. Remove "Mt Rushmore" from his vocabulary, and the man would be struck dumb.
BEHE: Well, let me start by saying that in Darwin's day, scientists thought that the cell was so simple that it might just spontaneously bubble up from sea mud. Might be just a little bit of JELL-O.
But in the past 50 years, especially, scientists have shown that it is chock full of molecular machines, literally molecular machines. There are little molecular trucks that carry supplies from one side of the cell to the others. There are little molecular sign posts that tell it to turn left or to turn right.
One in particular which has gotten a lot of media attention is something called a bacterial flagellum, which is literally an outboard motor that some bacteria use to swim. It's got a propeller. It's got a motor. It's got a drive shaft.
LOWRY: All right.
BEHE: It's got bolts to hold things on.
We desperately need an intervention here. I would greatly appreciate it if the next English major to meet Michael Behe would grab him by the ear, sit him down forceably at a desk, and drill him in the meaning of the English word, "literally". It does not mean what he thinks it means.
It is good to see Alan Colmes sprout some manly chest hair, though.
COLMES: What about any of this is scientific?
BEHE: I'm sorry?
COLMES: What about any of this is scientific?
Heh.
His answer? Things in cells are "Just like the machines in our everyday experience". Repeating the analogy doesn't make it science, Mikey.
*Figuratively, not literally.
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It seems like the ID men (are there any female defenders of this nonsense?) have a hard time understanding what an analogy is.
#: Posted by on 12/25 at 10:51 AM
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Nature doesn't know anything about little trucks and widget factories, we do, so it's no wonder that we should make the analogy. I mean it's a helpful cognitive aid in some contexts to make analogies (and impedes understanding in other contexts) but that's all they are.
#: Posted by on 12/25 at 11:06 AM
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There are little molecular trucks that carry supplies from one side of the cell to the others.
I wonder if Doc Levinthal gave him that idea so he wouldn't feel uncomfortable thinking about it...
Slurpy Holidays regardless Prof PZ.#: Posted by MBains on 12/25 at 11:21 AM -
From the interview, in the "Ironically, He's Right" department:
And at bottom, intelligent design in biology says we think like Mount Rushmore.
There you have it folks: Behe admits the IDists have rocks in their heads.#: Posted by on 12/25 at 11:48 AM -
Literally
adv. Figuratively#: Posted by The Rev. Schmitt. on 12/25 at 12:00 PM -
I think I've finally figured out what Behe's problem is: he thought that
Osmosis Jones was a documentary.#: Posted by on 12/25 at 12:10 PM -
i think if Behe and company are really going to push the marvels of engineering in the small, they really should learn the effects of physical scale on various apparatus. Starting with Vogel's Life in Moving Fluids might help.
#: Posted by ekzept on 12/25 at 12:16 PM
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Again with the definitions: literally.
#: Posted by jinx on 12/25 at 01:14 PM
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There are little molecular trucks that carry supplies from one side of the cell to the others.
Well, that gives me a fair idea of the identity of Behe's designer:
<a href="http://www.noblepr.co.uk/Press_Releases/hit/images/bob_the_builder/ss1.gif>Bob the Builder</a>#: Posted by Nullifidian on 12/25 at 02:38 PM -
hilarious.
Reminds me of one time (whilst working for a now-defunct employer) when a recently appointed company vice president was sent out to do a little "pep talk" for those of us down in the trenches*. He was doing reasonably well, if a little boring, right up to the point when he uttered this line:
"I want you to go out there and screw our competitors - literally"
after that, everbody was laughing so hard that the rest of the message sort of got lost...
*figuratively, not literally.#: Posted by on 12/25 at 05:12 PM -
PZ, you can't blog on Christmas! You'll play right into one of the Dembski-ites' chief criticisms of us: WE'RE NERDS WHO HAVE NO LIFE!
#: Posted by on 12/25 at 05:32 PM
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These people literally believed they had the horsepower to win a test case from a church-going-Bush-appointee judge, as if it were an officially legal version of the Kansas-Kangaroo-Kourt. Oops. Really bad highway lane selection.
They used this confidence scheme to raise funds from conservative "marks," as if funding alone could literally guarantee them victory, even in the absence of hard scientific conclusions. After all, don't hearts-and-minds trump data?
Now they are literally coming to the realization that their six-figure salaries are in peril, and after years of published information mismanagement, they've left themselves just enough qualifications to become convenience-store clerks.
How's that for adverbial usage, literally speaking?#: Posted by on 12/25 at 06:16 PM -
WE'RE NERDS WHO HAVE NO LIFE!
is going to church in the morning, rushing home to pack up with kids and gifts, and visiting a half dozen places with unpleasant relatives you never see any other time of year to eat an overcooked ham a description of a life ?#: Posted by ekzept on 12/25 at 06:23 PM -
They used this confidence scheme to raise funds from conservative "marks," as if funding alone could literally guarantee them victory, even in the absence of hard scientific conclusions.
funding and manipulation is how Congress and the White House were won. what i mean is that advertising and campaigning in contested voting districts is optimized to have the most effect for the least cost, but no more.
whenever i hear "activist judge", it says to me they want the federal judiciary manipulable in the same manner.
aw, heck , if ya just want a downer, go read about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, or Simpson's paradox.
as for me, i just make a cup of tea and go do spatial things with my Mathcad.#: Posted by ekzept on 12/25 at 06:33 PM -
Bored Huge Krill,
Maybe your former employer literally meant what he said. Everybody gettin' plenty sex might be really good for the morale of folks down in the trenches (whether the trenches are figurative or literal).
In the wake of advice like that I think the proper course of action is clear...#: Posted by on 12/25 at 07:20 PM -
"BEHE: It's got bolts to hold things on."
No, the flagellum does not have "bolts to hold things on." That simply is not true, even as an analogy. It's worse than calling the flagellum an "outboard motor," as he routinely does (the motor is inboard; maybe Behe's just too stupid to know the difference between inboard and outboard motors). It's like Steve Martin's old joke about messing up your kids by "teaching them to talk wrong." It's sad, and a tremendous missed opportunity.
Oh, and Ekzept, I agree. Vogel's book is very wonderful. I've been thinking of sending a copy to Johnathan Wells for Christmas. If he were to read it, he might see why his idea that centrioles are turbines that power the polar ejection force is physically implausible. Sadly he's been bad this year and merits only a lump of coal. I'm not talking about high-quality anthracite, either.#: Posted by Alex Merz on 12/25 at 08:39 PM -
The problem with giving coal as a present is that people will be tempted to burn it, and thus contribute to global warming. ;)
ekzept: Why is the AIT a downer?#: Posted by Keith Douglas on 12/26 at 09:25 AM -
<blockquote>
LOWRY: So I know, again, it's going to get technical. But for the layman out there, give us an example of something in biology that is comparable to Mount Rushmore.
BEHE: Well, let me start by saying that in Darwin's day, ...
</blockqutoe>
Eureka! I understand now why Darwin came up with his theory of natural selection. It's because Mt. Rushmore hadn't been 'designed' yet!#: Posted by on 12/26 at 10:39 AM -
COLMES: What about any of this is scientific?
BEHE: I'm sorry?
COLMES: What about any of this is scientificc?
Hmmm. Almost sounds like Colmes has been brushing up on Lenny Flank's Debate Tips.#: Posted by on 12/26 at 04:56 PM -
ekzept: Why is the AIT a downer?
recap: the "AIT" is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, a product of the Nobel-winning economist and maths wiz, Kenneth Arrow, who incidentally did not win the Nobel for it. (he got it for a rigorous proof of the existence of a market clearing equilibrium.) Arrow popularized the AIT in one of his books.
the AIT says no voting system (as in electoral system) meets all of a particular set of formalized, sensible and intuitive criteria when there are three or more choices. it is one of a class of theorems of which the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem is another example. i first encountered it as an example in Davey and Priestley's Introduction to Lattices and Order.
i judged this a "downer" in the context of this thread because of the implications of having yet another dramatic example of what IMO is the great gap between rigorous knowledge, mathematics, and the sciences and their popular understanding. because of the indisputable importance of such knowledge for civilization, its economy, and general well-being, mastery of it is becoming more crucial each year. yet our collective ability to educate people in these matters, while advancing, still lags the pace with which this knowledge is accumulated and applied.
the gap depresses more than just "academic eggheads" like myself, even if i do not teach at university or hold a doctorate. it means physicians are practicing with 1980s vintage biology as their mainstay. it means command of statistical methods and a statistical outlook, so critical for policy assessment and weighing evidence, remains the province of a minority, even of a minority of scientists and "knowledge worker" professionals.
without popular and public understanding or at least respect for these matters, competence in government and media is degraded, these being the leaders of public opinion. they are market-oriented beasts.
while links are not yet available online, the current issue of CHANCE magazine, a publication of the American Statistical Association (of which i am a member and subscriber), contains a pertinent article. written by Judith Singer and titled Afraid to discuss evolution?, it describes the pathetic editorial review and vetting the New York Times gave to its news reports and editorial (specifically the editorial of 4th February 2005) which gave rise to the widely quoted claim that 41% of high school biology teachers in Louisiana rejected evolution. the study in question, conducted by the same Aguillard who brought the suit in the Edwards v Aguillard case to the United States Supreme Court, apparently has response rate problems, questionnaire problems, and problems of bias resulting from Aguillard's name recognition. these quirks aren't artifacts: they are symptoms of violations of canons of statistical survey methodology. this isn't to say the result is exaggerated or deliberately down-played. either outcome might have evidence for it. what's the scientific sin here is that we don't know and people are pretending we do. hopefully the Pew study was better done.
my point is that this kind of shoddy evidence-gathering is more widespread than we pretend, in medicine as mentioned, in some engineering, based upon personal experience in industry, and possibly in some of the sciences.
AIT stands out as a clear conclusion having undeniable and counter-social implications if certain arguably reasonable assumptions are adopted. statistical analyses have been done of, e.g., the courts jury system which suggest it is not as powerful a truth-determiner as we like to pretend. and, as for Congressional testimony, whether by witnesses or members of Congress, well, veracity is seldom a virtue which is uniformly embraced. these mean conclusions will be reached and policies enacted which are not based upon our best assessment of reality. even artificial realities, such as securities markets, penalize players harshly for being disconnected from their fundamentals too long.
nevertheless, even if AIT be a downer, there's every historical reason to believe it's part of the human condition to be collectively slow, at least slow to change. in 1905, it's reported, at the time Einstein published his important but less famous work on Brownian motion, many physicists and chemists did not consider hypotheses arguing for the existence of atoms and molecules highly. if, then, it takes a quarter century for much of the scientific community to yield to its best ideas, perhaps it's not so troubling that the remainder of educated society might take a half century or longer.#: Posted by ekzept on 12/26 at 07:47 PM -
"it takes a quarter century for much of the scientific community to yield to its best ideas"
Pretty much one active generation (about thirty years), as one could expect. Of course, this observation is one example of shoddy evidence-gathering...#: Posted by on 12/27 at 08:17 AM