Intelligent Design (New York Times Op-Ed)

[anhinga_anhinga]

In a somewhat unusual development the New York Times publishes an op-ed, Design for Living, by Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University.

NYT Abstract: "The theory of intelligent design, though not creationist, differs in key points with pure Darwinian evolution".

Michael Behe is one of the leading advocates of the theory of intelligent design. The New York Times usually pushes the "party line" that evolution by natural selection is the Only True Theory, and that any deviation from it in the classroom is the plot of religious fundamentalists against separation between church and state.

In reality, the question is quite open, so this departure from Bolshevist practices of journalism is refreshing.

Comments

[faceless-lady.livejournal.com]

As I can see we have same interests. :-)
Till now no biologist couldn't explain me what's wrong with the theory of intelligent design from the side of biology...and what kind a mistake Behe made in his book "Darwin's Black Box".

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

Indeed :-)

The arguments about evolution are mostly dominated by theological differences, I suppose. Most people decide what is right and what is wrong about our understanding of evolution in advance, for ideological reasons...

I think the way to look at it is that neo-darwinism (pure natural selection + no inheritance of features acquired diring life) still has to account for relatively fast evolution rates, either by bringing in intelligent design, or in some other fashion. And that the burden of producing satisfactory quantitative models is still on the neo-darwinist school (and that their failure to do so after all these years is disappointing).

For example, last May Daniel S. Fisher gave a talk named "The rate of evolution: Is anything understood?" at ICCS2004, and he said that he is getting the time of the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years necessary to reach the current level of complexity, rather than 10¹⁰-10¹¹ years we actually had.

I'll ask him whether there is any update in his studies of this issue.

[faceless-lady.livejournal.com]

>he said that he is getting the time of the order of 10100 years necessary to reach the current level of complexity, rather than 1010-1011 years we actually had.


As I know such kind of arguments aren't strong enough....because this estimation depends on model.(Sorry, lack of terms...and time...as usual):(

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

It would certainly depend on the model. It turnes out that I've misunderstood him pretty strongly back then too.

He just clarified that his thesis should be understood as "the current level of understanding of time scales for evolution is so poor, that if the geophysical/radiological clocks (and recently would also have to be the neutral mutational clocks) were revised to imply that life on Earth was 10^100 yrs old rather than 10^10, evolutionary theorists would not (honestly) be surprised". He did not mean to imply the existence of any reasonable estimate of the evolutionary time scale whatsoever. (But he had some elaborate formulas on the blackboard during that talk, so the number was not merely pulled out of thin air. It's a pity that they only publish abstracts at that conference.)

So it's even worse. Basically, nothing is known about rates of evolution. And virtually nothing is done about this.

If 10% of the energy spent on the "theological defense of Darwinism" would be spend on analysis of the rate of evolution under different models, we might have known something more definitely already, one way or another.