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Mount Rushmore

Entry 649, on 2007-11-28 at 18:35:54 (Rating 4, Religion)

How can anyone be so intelligent but at the same time so dumb? I'm talking about prominent intelligent design supporter Michael Behe who I recently heard being interviewed on a podcast. Presumably he is an intelligent person because he is a professor of biochemistry at an American university but his arguments when it comes to evolution display lack of logic and ignorance of facts.

His first misleading statement was regarding Mount Rushmore. Apparently the fact that it is "obviously intelligently designed" supports the idea of intelligent design in biological systems. Well it doesn't. Behe appears to be making the same mistake that IDers/creationists have been making for many years: they assume evolution is random and unguided.

Imagine Mount Rushmore was carved by random factors but as the shapes formed they were either thrown away or kept depending on how close to an ideal shape they were. Then imagine the process occurred in parallel in billions of sites, then imagine it happened over billions of years. I would be surprised if the statues didn't appear in that case.

That's how evolution works. It isn't totally random, it is controlled by factors which can create complex structures as long as there is pressure on those structures to survive in preference to others. And the process happens in small stages. We don't see this in Mount Rushmore because that really was intelligently designed but we do see it in biological systems, even the IDers classic cases such as the bacterial flagellum and blood clotting.

Actually those two examples support evolution, but maybe that's why they aren't mentioned so much by IDers any more. The fact that clotting happens through several processes which do work independently (and only some processes are seen in some types of animals) is exactly what we would expect from evolution. If god created blood clotting why would he start with a system that works OK until the blood pressure increases then add another component on top?

So I think its time for Behe to give up his ideas on ID. As I listen to him I think I detect a note of uncertainty in his voice. Maybe, deep down, he knows he's wrong and that he is doomed to go down in the annals of science as someone who had the skills but couldn't escape the brainwashing of his Catholic upbringing. The references to flagella and clotting seem to be disappearing, but here's a hint Michael: its time to give up on the Mount Rushmore metaphor as well!

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