The Argument for Intelligent Design in Biology

2. Disclaimer: The opinions presented here are solely my own, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Lehigh University or any of its departments or employees.

3. The Argument for Intelligent Design in Biology Michael J Behe Lehigh University Bethlehem, PA

5. My argument : • Design not mystical. Deduced from physical structure of a system • Everyone agrees aspects of biology appear designed • There are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution • Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination • Bottom line: Strong evidence for design, little evidence for Darwinism

6. My argument : • Design not mystical. Deduced from physical structure of a system • Everyone agrees aspects of biology appear designed • There are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution • Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination • Bottom line: Strong evidence for design, little evidence for Darwinism

7. What is “intelligent design”? • “de-sign' (n) — The purposeful or inventive arrangement of parts or details”, www.thefreedictionary.com • Design is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts • We infer design whenever parts appear arranged to accomplish a function

10. What is “intelligent design”? • The strength of the inference is quantitative.

11. Sawtooth mountains, Idaho

12. Old Man of the Mountain, New Hampshire

13. Mount Rushmore, South Dakota

14. My argument : • Design not mystical. Deduced from physical structure of a system • Everyone agrees aspects of biology appear designed • There are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution • Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination • Bottom line: Strong evidence for design, little evidence for Darwinism

15. Dawkins R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton, p. 1 • “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”

16. Dawkins R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton, p. 21 • “We may say that a living body or organ is well designed if it has attributes that an intelligent and knowledgeable engineer might have built into it in order to achieve some sensible purpose, such as flying, swimming, seeing … [A]ny engineer can recognize an object that has been designed, even poorly designed, for a purpose, and he can usually work out what that purpose is just by looking at the structure of the object.”

17. Dawkins R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton, p. 21 • “Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.”

18. William Paley . . . when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive. . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; . . . The inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.

20. Cell (1998) 92, table of contents. • “The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines” • “Polymerases and the Replisome: Machines within Machines” • “Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks, Springs, and Things”

21. Alberts, B.A. (1998). The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists. Cell93, 291-294. • “The chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered. ... Indeed, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.”

22. Alberts, B.A. (1998). The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists. Cell93, 291-294. • “Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like the machines invented by humans …, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts. ”

23. My argument : • Design not mystical. Deduced from physical structure of a system • Everyone agrees aspects of biology appear designed • There are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution • Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination • Bottom line: Strong evidence for design, little evidence for Darwinism

24. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 158 • If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

25. Irreducible Complexity

27. The Bacterial Flagellum Voet & Voet, 1995

28. My argument : • Design not mystical. Deduced from physical structure of a system • Everyone agrees aspects of biology appear designed • There are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution • Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination • Bottom line: Strong evidence for design, little evidence for Darwinism

30. New York Times Washington Post Allentown Morning Call Aboard (Bolivia) Christianity Today Skeptic Darwin’s Black Box has been reviewed or profiled in the following:

31. New York Times Washington Post Allentown Morning Call Nature American Scientist Chronicle of Higher Education Boston Review Aboard (Bolivia) Christianity Today Skeptic Quarterly Review of Biology Philosophy of Science Biology & Philosophy and many others... Darwin’s Black Box has been reviewed or profiled in the following:

32. “Mr. Behe may be right that given our current state of knowledge, good old Darwinian evolution cannot explain the origin of blood clotting or cellular transport.” James Shreeve, New York Times “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.” James Shapiro, National Review “There is no doubt that the pathways described by Behe are dauntingly complex, and their evolution will be hard to unravel.... We may forever be unable to envisage the first proto-pathways.” Jerry Coyne, Nature “Pick up any biochemistry textbook, and you will find perhaps two or three references to evolution. Turn to one of these and you will be lucky to find anything better than ‘evolution selects the fittest molecules for their biological function.’” Andrew Pomiankowski, New Scientist “Provocative, audacious, and original.” Richard Restak, Brainwork (The Neuroscience Newsletter)

33. Griffin, D. R. Religion and Scientific Naturalism; SUNY Press: 2000, p. 287. • The response I have received from repeating Behe’s claim about the evolutionary literature—which simply brings out the point being made implicitly by many others, such as Crick, Denton, Shapiro, Stanley, Taylor, Wesson—is that I obviously have not read the right books. There are, I am assured, evolutionists who have described how the transitions in question could have occurred.

34. Griffin, D. R. Religion and Scientific Naturalism; SUNY Press: 2000, p. 287. • When I ask in which books I can find these discussions, however, I either get no answer or else some titles that, upon examination, do not in fact contain the promised accounts. That such accounts exist seems to be something that is widely known, but I have yet to encounter anyone who knows where they exist.

36. Franklin M. Harold, The Way of the Cell, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 205 • “We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity (Behe 1996); but we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”

39. My argument : • Design not mystical. Deduced from physical structure of a system • Everyone agrees aspects of biology appear designed • There are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution • Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination • Bottom line: Strong evidence for design, little evidence for Darwinism

40. Dawkins R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton, p. 21 • “Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.”

41. An In-duck-tive Argument

42. Encyclopedia Brittanica Onlinehttp://search.eb.com/ebi/article?tocId=204014 • Inductive reasoning. • When a person uses a number of established facts to draw a general conclusion, he uses inductive reasoning. This is the kind of logic normally used in the sciences. … An inductive argument, however, is never final: It is always open to the possibility of being falsified. … It is by this process of induction and falsification that progress is made in the sciences.

43. My argument : • Design not mystical. Deduced from physical structure of a system • Everyone agrees aspects of biology appear designed • There are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution • Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination • Bottom line: Strong evidence for design, little evidence for Darwinism

44. My responses to critics can be found at: • Behe, M.J. 2004. “Irreducible Complexity: Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution.” In Debating Design: from Darwin to DNA, Ruse, M. and Dembski, W.A., eds., Cambridge University Press, pp. 352-370. • Behe, M.J. 2003. “The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis: Breaking Rules.” In God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, Neil Manson, ed., Routledge, pp. 277-291. • Behe, M.J. 2001. Reply to My Critics: A Response to Reviews of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Biology and Philosophy16, 685-709. • Behe, M.J. 2000. Self-Organization and Irreducibly Complex Systems: A Reply to Shanks and Joplin. Philosophy of Science67, 155-162. • WWW.CRSC.ORG