An hour with Michael Behe

from across the entire theater at the university of kansas kbr presence michael b i'm kate mcintyre michael b is one of the most renowned defenders of intelligent design his nineteen ninety six book darwin's black box is considered by some to be the bible of intelligent design as a vocal critic of teaching darwinian evolution in public schools b is often at the forefront of legal and professional controversy professor be his talk was part of a difficult dialogue series on knowledge faith and reason co sponsored by the hall center for the humanities and the bio diversity institute at the university of kansas and now here is michael b he thank you very much both professors bailey and restock her for the introductions and thank you very much for the invitation to speak in this series like tacos going to be titled as you heard the argument for intelligent design in biology and it's hard as you know the difficult of dialogues series and so i want to reiterate what

professor for stock a sad that i'm speaking for myself don't blame anybody else for these ideas i'm so my mind your mother disagrees with a so everything you hear is that you to me but this is going to be an especially difficult dialogue for me because our number of speakers that preceded me in this series strongly oppose the position that i am going to defend the day and spent some of their lectures are arguing against it so the problem for me as just as a speaker them is that if some of the audience has attended those talks you rarely have objections in the back of your mind as i go through my presentation and that interferes with the speakers it hadn't her ability to get it crosses has some point so the point of this is that i'm going to break down my talk into two parts the second part

is going to be the argument itself but in the first part of an offer a rebuttal to some of the positions that the earlier speakers talk and defend intelligent design and just give you at least a bit of a reason to keep an open mind for when i actually present the argument so let me start out with the opinion issued indeed over and over a school district trial by judge john jones who spoke in the series a couple months ago as you are rarely heard if you attended some of the other lectures the judge issued a stinging decision in the trial not only ruling that the dover district school policy had to be stopped but also rolling that intelligent design is not science that intelligent design is

religion furthermore that the reasoning behind intelligent design is illogical and flimsy as you might expect our folks are defending darwinian evolution were very pleased with the judge's ruling gotten out you can see this very well ah but here's a yahoo this is a screen shot of art handlers our website john miller spoke here earlier in the series as well are proclaiming a victory for science in education in dover and featuring a picture of himself giving testimony in the trial and in his web page he has statements such as judge jones clearly grasped the weight of scientific evidence behind evolution so the idea was this forum for ten dollars web page and other things those that here we had an intelligent individual who didn't

have any you know no reason to rule one way or another who looked carefully at the evidence weigh it and came down strongly on the darwinian side and against intelligent design and so and so but darwin inside then could argue that here we had an affair she dishes look at the arguments and that should count heavily in the year india one now people come due to the conclusion of their own and in fact that is what happened in many cases and here's an example of this is the gilbert blog i don't know how many of you read this but it is put out by scott adams was the cartoonist who draws to work they may not know it but he says he's scared of interested in these issues of of evolution where we came from what does like me and so on and last spring early last spring

he wrote on his blog that intelligent design was put to the test and over in the dover trial and failed miserably in convincing a judge and should be considered science if you're in the judge's opinion he heard from both sides and it wasn't even a close call that's good enough for me until that verdict i was having a hard time with the obvious bias is on both sides but but now i am satisfied with the outcome so again the idea's it was heard by a fair and impartial observer and that's good enough to to come to a decision and another fellow who weighed in on this is a man named jay wexler there was a professor of law at boston university and is interested in and issues of religion and in the public square and i think in addition to being a as in addition to being a professor of law is also a

contributor to a book by eugenie scott you probably can't see that as the tanks rolled into a small called not in our classrooms which argues against intelligent design being taught in schools and professor wexler remarks that judge jones opinion which ran two hundred and thirty nine pages in length was a comprehensive and complete victory for id opponents to be sure the opinion as well written painstakingly documented and mostly right it is not however flawless and i'll get later on to be at the flaw that professor wexler susanna but right now let's look at an example of how well written the opinion was like here's a snippet from the opinion judge jones wrote indeed the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the purposeful arrangement of parts is based upon an analogy to human desire because we're able to recognize design of

artifacts and objects according to professor bea that same reasoning can be employed to determine biological design professor bea testified that the strength of the analogy depends upon the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions however if this is the test it completely fails well as a ways back i disagree with them but i have to admit that it is well written it strongly word and it reflects an informed point of view and a lot of other people were impressed by the judge's opinion to for example time magazine named him one of their hunt hundred most influential people in the world along with pope benedict the sixteenth secretary state congolese arrives and so on and if you look on their web page ii john judge john jones name is listed are among a handful of scientists and thinkers is all the

water of dickinson college and he also graduated from because of law school had him as their commencement speaker this past spring and conferred upon him an honorary degree and india india can for all it says jaczko judge jones you're the author of the kitzmiller opinion and it goes on then to list a number of interesting things that have happened to judge jones as a result of the trial your decision led to a number of interesting developments including articles and harper's and the new yorker where you were described as a rugged nineteen forties movie star a cross between william holden and robert mitchum lessing as one of time magazine's hundred most influential people in the world for two thousand sex in times words you're one of those people who matter most paramount pictures began work on a movie about the dover school board in which you your role as presiding judge will be featured an of all this attention were not enough you were singled

out by wired magazine as one of the ten sexiest geeks of two thousand and five so in other words judge jones as a rock star and he went on to say as noel potter emeritus professor of geology put it judge jones is my hero you are a hero indeed judge jones because of professor parker said it it must be true and so it is free or her road opinions that we take this opportunity to ponder you today and in his acceptance and commencement speech he had words of advice for the for the graduates he wrote in my life a great confluence of using the value of my liberal arts education and following might less happened recently as i sat as the presiding judge in the kitzmiller verses dover case having achieved a career goal of becoming a federal judge i was able to apply a lifetime of accumulated learning in resolving the dispute upon which world attention had focused for you these moments of

confluence your own dover moments can and should happen in a myriad of circumstances both large and small and i'm certain that if you continue to learn your be prepared when they do meet eric ross trial eric is not a nineteen forties movie star and usually he's a product liability trial lawyer working with the firm in philadelphia ah but he was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the dover trial and the plaintiffs i had i must have been a dozen or so lawyers who were working on the case and they poured in at enormous are out of work and i didn't know beforehand but these legal proceedings of all involve quite a bit of paperwork and writing and so on and one of the documents that eric ross how team put out is called pay the plaintiffs proposed finding of fact it turns

out that in trials after the proceedings are done that before the judge issues opinions both sides can kind of give him documents that they think that they propose how the finding should go so it's the proposed finding of facts there and in fact this was given to him about a month before his opinion was issued and if you look at this proposed finding of fact it's it's a very very detailed as a matter fact is it's long to it's a hundred and sixty one pages versus a hundred and thirty nine page court decision and as a matter fact if you read that proposed finding of fact you can see something echoes of what is going to be appearing in the judge's opinion for example judge jones wrote indeed the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the purposeful arrangement parts is based upon an analogy to human design but eric ross child had written

the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the preferred provoke purposeful racial part is based on an analogy to human side but applying a lifetime of accumulated learning judge jones added the word indeed and change the proposition on to a point so if you look at it closely you'll say that judge jones took the phrase according to professor bea and moved from the beginning of the sounds to the middle of the sounds the third sentence judge jones decided that it should not be in the next paragraph it should be in that paragraph and that it should have an area of the word however added to the last sentence as a matter fact if you look at all of the opinion whenever he is writing about the academic issues upon which the expert witnesses

testified it is a very lightly edited cut and paste drag and drop from the document that was submitted by the plaintiffs trial lawyers on occasion the judge added a fragment of a certain sometimes even a whole sentence for example in this two paragraphs their crosstown had written that would be read mostly i was myself science cannot be defined differently for dover students then that is defined by scientists there's also some other things and then makes a yet another point that out in the next paragraph judge jones took both of those ten then added a connecting phrase abundance of caution and in the exercise of leaders we will analyze additional arguments advanced recording concepts of it and

science and that was his contribution to the reasoning in the opinion time magazine got the wrong guy if they wanted a person who was behind the reasoning of the dover dover school decision they should've had eric ross drought in this picture or perhaps some other members of his team well but maybe we're being a little hasty although academia like the everest of cannes is lehigh university other academic institutions well academia does not auger folks who copy other people's writing and lightly edited nonetheless i'm told by my lawyer acquaintances that it's not unheard of for a judge to take take prose written by some lawyers and included an opinion although not usually on such a large scale was this so

although we can credit the judge with the actual ideas and prose of the opinion may be perhaps we can at least threatened him with recognizing a good argument and and the least recognizing recognizing how something that was good and an and putting your signature on that but it turns out there serious reason to question whether the judge even understood the academic issues that were presented by the expert witnesses in his courtroom in his presentation here at ha you a couple months ago our which is available on the whole center website it did as he does and most of his many speaking appearances these days it out decided not to discuss the issues of the trial itself

the city didn't want to rehash the issues becky opinion speaks for itself furthermore in his remarks here you said that the dover trial featured mind numbingly technical presentations what if his mind was numbed by the technical presentations how could he ruled rationally on those presentations any further said that's the highly technical scientific testimony is rapidly becoming a distant memory he said here it actually you but there is good reason to think that it rapidly became a distant memory almost as soon as it was over and before the opinion was issued for example in this excerpt from the opinion he talks about my testimony on the immune system he says is written in fact on cross examination president

professor bea was questioned the concern is ninety nine plan that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system he was presented with fifty eight peer reviewed publications and other things however he simply insisted that that was still not sufficient evidence of evolution and that it was not good enough and of course he got got this from eric ross child's a document this was a moment of the trial which was ripped off recounted with great lead by kenneth miller while he was here in which eric rothschild i was on the witness stand and eric ross child asked the judge if he could approach the witness me and he had a stack of books and papers and proceeded to bring them over and put them on on the table in front of me not i got you know mr naim a tacit i thought was oh she that this is no bad courtrooms theater you know it

it's like yeah like the movie miracle on thirty four street where their bags of letters to stand there were brought into the courtroom in and dumped on on the judge's desk as in you know what what's this supposed to show and down but nonetheless oh i should add that this this picture here of the stack of attacks and papers i was not taken in the courtroom were were pictures are not allowed it was staged just like the event itself was staged and ken miller in his presentation here are recounted this moment with with great relish saying that they are good they're good courtroom our depends on with theater too and i thought it was not particularly good theater but here's the years the hbo the point the point was supposed to be look here's all these mounds of evidence for darwinian evolution here it's just it's blocking blocking professor bp we can even see him behind behind

all of that evidence and that in response to this all i could say was that simply insist that this was still a sufficient evidence of evolution and it was not good enough ok so i was left is flailing in and i'm speechless so why this presentation but something does not jibe here in his presentation here again judge jones noted that professor bees cross examination went on for a very long period of time as did his direct examination and i'll tell you it certainly did go on for a long period time i was on the stand for three entire days with lawyers in my face for eight hours a day and during that time i talk about quite a few mind numbingly technical topics i talked about the bacteria flagellum the type three secret were assisted the blood clotting cascade professor gary hall's work on a laptop or on the end you've already collect a citation and i

talked in great detail about the immune system and my direct testimony i had twelve slides on the immune system and i must have spoken about it for half an hour for example the next for slides arms are slides that i showed in the courtroom for example i showed that this paper by klein an acolyte us from the year two thousand and five called the dissent of the body based immune system by gradual evolution and i showed that in the paper the authors say that according to our currently popular view the big bang hypothesis the adaptive immune system arose suddenly within a relatively short time intervals an association with postulated two rounds of genome wide duplication i point out to the court that here was a paper published in two thousand and five which says that the standard view of how the immune system

came about in a rapid burst in a rapid appearance was wrong and that instead they were proposing a different view of how the immune system might have come about and i further showed it i guess i neglected to say that this paper by klein and politeness was discussed in depth by kenneth miller and his expert report for the court and i was directly addressing the testimony of the other side's scientific witnesses i took out some text from the quarter from that from the paper and showed them reading it won't be able to return to see it too well but it says here it says here we sketched out some of the changes that the emergence of the immune system and tail and speculate how they may have come about we argue that it only appears to be so these domains are probably genuine and three tribes probably evolved protein

chinese is probably would require never less it might have presumably imagine white house and so on in other words i showed the court that this was a very speculative people and i made the point that if immunologist were speculating in the year two thousand and five about how the immune system might have developed by darwinian process is then they surely would not no in earlier years how that might have happened i further then showed i went through all of the papers that were discussed by professor miller and his testimony and i analyze them and looked for the phrase either random mutation or natural selection and i showed that and none of the papers and other supplies with other papers on them too and none of the paper's did either of those phrases appear and i pointed out to the court that the idea of intelligent design

does not preclude come in dissent it focuses directly on the question of of weather intelligence is involved or whether random an intelligent processors random mutation a natural selection could be responsible for some and so i argued the court that these papers several of which are it's very recent don't even address that question they simply assume that it's correct but nonetheless despite all the time and all the testimony on this point the only thing that comes out in the court reporter the opinion is that there was this big stack of papers placed in front of professor bea and all i could do was flailing scans and say that's not enough and that's not good enough and how much that last phrase it was not good enough those papers were not good enough

isn't that are not obnoxious phrase what kind of a guy would look in a stack of papers and say they're not good enough that sounds like some old lawyer would say doesn't this is a transcript of the trial here's eric ross drought their roster out was cross examining me he was asking the question and here is in boxes the relevant portion of the of the transcript he said so these are not good enough and what that i respond that i say damn right there aren't enough no i said they're wonderful articles they're very interesting they just don't address the question i pose so let me emphasize it was a lawyer the product liability trial lawyer who said are these good enough and i said there are wonderful articles he

went on for another minute or two and then he asked another question is that your position today that these particles are good enough you need to see a step by step description at this point i realized he was trying to stuff words in my mouth as lawyers in there in her charming way will try to do a dry and so i said these articles are excellent articles i assume president there was this huge stack however they do not address the question i am posing so it's not that they aren't good enough it's simply that they are addressed to a different subject so imagine my surprise when the opinion came out and i read that in fact on cross examination he was presented with all these publications he simply insisted it was not good enough so the court opinion ms characterized my testimony

and it quoted me as affirming words by either area depending on a lookout it either never said or explicitly denied and i'm in the position these days the following candle around and trying to point out that the little seen that he's chortling over existed only in the imagination of eric ross child and what's more when i read picked up a copy of the god delusion by richard dawkins which is on the new york times bestseller list i see i see an account of the same scene in his book explicitly quoting just the passage that i have analyzed for you here today and this is now being read by hundreds of thousands of people who now know that all i did was simply insist that it was not good enough i don't know how many of you folks are there

are been entangled in the legal system and i hope it's not many but it even if you haven't if you read enough literature and to read enough news you'll realize that not all operations of our legal system our exercises and daughter are rationality but for myself my involvement with it has given me at a new appreciation for the word kafka esque markets beiser real distortion so what are we to make of all this this lengthy presentation at and the question is why why would a judge issued a strongly worded opinion on subjects he gives no indication of having understood in his courtroom well i do not know ah but nonetheless the important point it is that scott adams is back in the people he was before the trial

began there is no lies philosopher king who could decide these difficult dialogues for us there is just the former head of the pennsylvania liquor control board which is an honorable job but does not prepare one for the types of discussions that i came up in in this trial a former head of the liquor control board who signed off on a tendentious brief buy a product liability trial lawyer oh which touted the side of his clients and caricature and denigrated the arguments of the other side as as brief spy trial lawyers have done since the beginning of time and the point i did that or i wish to make a simply that no matter what side of the issue you are on a word meaning to god this is no basis for an intelligent

decision on the topic and so i think we can finally see that that jerry wexler is the objection is well founded he wrote the question is whether judges should be deciding in their written opinions that it is or is not science a question that sounds and philosophy of science as a matter of law on the coup on this question the answer is no the park it's biller that finds it not to be science is unnecessary unconvincing not particularly suited to the judicial role and even perhaps dangerous to both science and freedom of religion ok let me continue now and i want to offer a much briefer rebuttal was simply to professor dawkins presentation because he got to such a large audience is so so well known out that his is that talk gets a lot of publicity so a lot of people probably

have some points that he made and their minds and let me just give you least a little bit of a reason to withhold judgment on whether they are are are not correct and so that i can present my case for design and for the isi rebuttal i'm going to defer completely to a man named thomas nicole who's a prominent philosopher at new york university and he wrote a review of professor dawkins book called the fear of religion which was published a month ago in the magazine the new republic and thomas natal is himself an atheist but nonetheless by his review was quite critical why he writes the following dawkins dismisses with a contemptuous flippancy the traditional a priority arguments for the existence of god offered by aquinas in and sell these are things like the ontological argument the cosmological argument and so on i found these attempts at philosophy particularly week dokken seems to have felt obliged to include them for the sake of completeness so the point

is simply that a professional philosopher was not impressed with the beat those are types of arguments that professor dawkins made while dawkins real concern is with the argument from design because they're the conflict between religious belief and atheism takes the form of a scientific disagreement and it's worthwhile to pause here to say that middle and richard dawkins himself disagree with judge jones and they think a claim of intelligent design is a scientific claim they think it's false or livestock and sixty fours are but nonetheless think it's a scientific claim a disagreement over the most plausible explanation of the observable evidence almond milk and seeds has it not the not darwinian evolution of life but false professor dawkins on the origin of life it says dawkins recognizes the problem of the origin of life but his response to it is pure

hand waving first he says it only had happened what's next he says that there are the conservative estimate is a billion billion planets in the universe would like friendly physical environments dawkins is not a chemist or a physicist neither why but general expletives expositions work of research on the origin of life including and again i'm sorry that no one has a theory that would support anything remotely me you're such a high probability as one in a billion billion in other words this philosopher who keeps up on such things knows that professor goggins hold this number out of his hat one in a billion one in a billion billion or where did that number come from well nobody knows but then he goes on to address what he calls dawkins native orchid dawkins negative or even ask who they got a designer god cannot be used to explain organize complexity says

dolphins because any god capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right but again it wasn't impressed he says the negative argument depends i believe on this understanding of the conclusion of the argument from design and its traditional sense as an argument for the existence of god but whatever he may be is not a complex physical inhabitants of the natural world so such arguments don't pertain to something that is not a complex inhabitants of our world and he continues all explanations come to an end somewhere the real opposition between dawkins physical as naturalism and the god hypothesis is a disagreement over whether the standpoint is a physical extension all and purposeless or metal intentional and purposely of process so in some way i would say that professor nagle is

sympathetic to the dawkins project i think said he is so impatient and hears arguments don't don't work ok well come i felt it was necessary to use to start with that simply because i speak a lot and if an audience is this thinking of objections well in talking then then it's hard for me to make headway so my first part was this rebuttal and some summarize by saying that the dover court decision simply uncritically recycled the trial lawyers brief and the second point is a professor dark dawkins arguments seem quite superficial to an eminent atheist philosopher so now i want to get to that design argument itself and it's actually a very simple argument by and as matter of fact the gist of it was was published it in an op ed piece by myself about a year and a half ago in the new york times a while all of this gathering storm was was a developer and the argument is the

following there are five points the first is that design a conclusion of design is not some mystical conclusion it's not something we have to close your eyes and raise your hands to see its deduced from the physical structure of the system the next point is that everyone everyone agrees that aspects of biology appear to be design the third point is that some of these people who think that nonetheless think there's an alternative explanation darwinian evolution next point is that there are structural obstacles to darwinian evolution of fourth related point is that grand darwinian claims not all little darwinian claims with the grand darwinian claims rest on and disciplined imagination and the final point is that the bottom line is that there is strong evidence for design but little evidence for gardeners so let's start off with that first pointed out that design is not mystical was deduced

from the physical structure of the system first we have to cite what is intelligent design what do i mean by that well if you look in dictionaries design has a number of definitions but the prevent one is this a purposeful or inventive arrangement of parts or details and so we can say that intelligent design is simply the purposeful arrangement of hearts and that means that we infer design whenever parts appear to be arranged into to accomplish a function and let me try to illustrate this over the next few slides for example this is a far side cartoon and without a troop of jungle explorers here and the lead explorer has been strung up and skewered and the sky turned to the sky and says that's why i never walked in from words to live by willy joe you know

everybody in this auditorium look at this car and you immediately realized that was designed that wasn't an accident as a matter fact the humor of the cartoon depends on you recognizing that it was designed how do you know that you know was designed you know it was designed because you see a number of parts arranged in order to accomplish a function the purpose for arrangement parts let's go to the next line of this is a pile of legos now of course there is just a bunch of them there and here's another pile of legos what's the difference between those two thousand legos well you immediately perceived that this second pile of legos does not seem to be just a pile of part seem to

be arranged in order to accomplish and as a matter fact i am re on the website that if you push this thing it shoots a cannonball out to talk and when you see that you know that is not an ordinary random pile of legos that it is purposely design it is a purposeful arrangement of parts so the point is that we perceive that's how we detect design that's why we suspect is a time when we see a purposeful arrangement of parts another important port in point is this that the strength of the inference is quantitative a purposeful regime of parts the more parts that are arranged and the more precisely they're arranged in order to accomplish more and more intricate function that more and more strongly our conclusion of design becomes years of cricket was duration of that you look at this moment and think well that's pretty mountain ah but you don't

think much more than that but if you see this mountain you save yourself half the sky looks like a forehead and this might be a nose and swipe your chin that effect has a picture of something called the old man of the mountain in a new hampshire which unfortunately feel down here too though these are repairing workers try to fix it up this at sochi i wonder if song yo paleo with thick guys light of arrange that you know maybe it's the one other teachers of like that that's probably just i probably just a year or something look scott like a face but if you look at this mountain you immediately know that you would never think that this was just a random arrangement apart so lucky lucky lucky configuration of them are so the point is that the strength of the divides of design inferences quantitative the more parts more

precisely they fit their purpose the stronger our conclusion of design becomes the second point is that everyone agrees aspects of biology appear to be designed and when i say everyone i mean even those who in fact strongly agree agree that the appearance of design as is reliable for example i in his classic book the blind watchmaker in nineteen eighty six richard dawkins wrote on the first page of the first chapter that will biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose that is the very definition of biology according to richard dawkins the appearance that complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose well what what is this appearance but as it is it's summer a static judgments do we decide that something is designed cars that it looks nice like a pretty song sadder or a

pretty flower or something like that no not according to richard dawkins according to bachmann's in the blind watchmaker our conclusion far the appearance of design is an engineering decision he wrote we may say that a living body or organ is well designed if it has attributes that an intelligent and knowledgeable engineer why that build into it in order to achieve some sensible purpose such as flying swimming or seeing any engineer can recognize an object that has been designed to even poorly designed for a purpose and he can usually work out what their purpose is just by looking at the structure of the object that is the purposeful arrangement of parts of course richard dawkins does not think that the designers really thinks at random mutation a natural selection is in fact the blinds watchmaker but nonetheless he does not think the disappearance of design is is

modest not like the old man of the mountain he thinks it's overwhelming like mount everest and he writes natural selection as the blind watchmaker yet the living results of natural selection overwhelming lee impress us with the appearance of design as if biomass or watchmaker impress us with the illusion of design and planning now the title the blind watchmaker is a delusion back to to the work of william paley be i well no a nineteenth century anglican clergyman who made the famous watchmaker argument william paley said are roads that sound if you we're walking across the meadow a new kind of your foot against the rock you'd think any ashes of word iraq come from it's a well for all i know what a been there forever but he says suppose you walked across the meadow and hit your foot a prawn a watch when we come to

inspect the watch he says we perceive that hit several parts are framed then put together for purpose they're so form an 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 to make a purposeful arrangement parts once again well the resemblance of life of parts of life odd to mechanical objects like watches has become enormously stronger than it was in william paley stay for example in the late nineteen nineties a special issue of the journal cell was dedicated to the topic of macro molecular machines and if you look at the lower left in corner the artist has drawn something that might be an evocative of william paley is watch their and if you look at the table of contents of that special issue of the journal cell you see articles

such as the cell is a collection of protein machines collaborators in the rebels' own machines within machines mechanical devices of the splices motors clocks springs and things so again as biology has progressed further and further and further and we got into the to the foundation of life we've discovered that william paley didn't do know the half of that day that they're selling is essentially built from complex machines and here is a an example art computer rendering of one such miss you know i'm not going to discuss into something called the periodic psyllium that i just want to show you the picture just to show you the intricacy and the number of parts that is involved in such a thing and it's interesting that this that this illustration was published in a journal called nanotechnology nanotechnology which is hot these days people trying to make machines on the nano readers scale ok

so that was the point that everyone agrees that aspects of biology appear to be design but of course by richard dawkins and most biologist do not think that the design israel they think that darwinian process is produced this complexity so the third one of my argument is that there are structural obstacles to darwinian evolution and in particular this was noticed first by charles darwin himself wrote in the origin of species that if it could not be if it'd be demonstrated and any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous success a slight modifications my theory would absolutely break down adding but i can find out no such chase well what sort of the system could not be formed by numerous successive slight modifications and that's the type of system that i have dubbed the reduce of the complex or has the property of your readers about complexity as professor ghosh crocker

pointed out in his introduction and as an example from our everyday world in my book dark black box in talks i show a picture of a mechanical mousetrap and the mousetrap has a number of different parts spring platform and so on and if any of these parts is removed then the trap doesn't work as a trap anymore it's it's essentially broke i in order to work as a trap that leads all these parts together so that's the idea here usable complexity and although i don't have time to go into much detail here the question is are there here is the complex systems in the cell and if so that would be big problems for darwinian theory which has to print see by numerous success of slight modifications and that's very difficult do to build something that way that serious of the complex and the answer is yes

that cell is just chock full of things that are to reduce the complex all of those machines that were being discussed in the special issue of so are would be to reduce the complex and perhaps the best visual example a very visible complexity of a molecular machine is the bacterial flagella which is quite literally an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim and it's got a number of parts that it's read it requires it's got this this awful at which acts as a propeller it's got a whole region which acts as a universal joy despite a drive shaft here which connected to the motor the motor uses a flow of assets due to power though they're turning over at the drive shaft just a poke up through the bacterial membrane and that's the job of a couple different kinds of protein act is pushing a cheerio and in the absence of the hulk in the absence of the drive shaft in the absence of the propeller are you do not get a flagellum that spins have this

pass or recorders fast you don't get one that works as the flagellum and all are so it's very difficult to see how such things could be put together in a darwinian process art but and i want to emphasize this flagellum is when i pointed this out ten years ago but the parts of the flagellum has drawn here most people who are accused of these things just think well how hard is it to get this little hot thing like this other parts of the jell o r little symmetrical geometric figures like this in fact they consist of very complex macro on molecules and here's to such things stuck together i just show this to show you the complexity of their surfaces they can ask yourself why do they stick together the reason is that there's a little cartoon again not only is the geometry of their services complimentary but the chemical properties of their services have to be complimentary

to soften one is going to put together a try put together by darwinian process is a structure such as the flagellum you don't just have to say well let's let's get a road or here in something very you have to adjust the shapes you have to adjust the chemical surfaces that it is an enormously daunting task and which nobody has ever tried to explain an unknown in relevant detail ok the next point is that graham darwinian claims rest on and disciplined imagination and of course imagination can be a good thing in science you might think as things that that other people don't think of ah but imagination is a two edged sword you might see things that other people miss that sometimes if you're not careful you might see things that aren't there and now for this point in the interest of time i'm just going to quote a man named franklin harold who works in america officer by chemistry colorado state published a book called the

way of the cell in two thousand juan was published by oxford university press and he briefly considered this topic of intelligent design and he said we should reject as a matter of principle the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue a chance a necessity and he never says what principle is but he says we must concede that there are presently no detail darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system only a variety of wishful speculations only a variety of wishful speculations in other words more colloquially known as just so stories know how the tiger got its stripes how the rhinoceros got its horror how the bacterium that is when joe this is the level of explanation that that exists in trying to explain complex why are chemical machines in a darwinian fashion it's a useful point out that he says that there are no detail darwinian accounts and so he must have missed that stack

of papers and books that was placed on my hear on the witness stand and in the dover trial additionally just one more i guess sometimes though you could ask this somebody you can say are there any darwinian accounts for this machine and oftentimes you get a response that says you know yeah sure there's plenty of them out there matter fact that's the response them and then name david griffin is a professor of the philosophy of religion at claremont mckenna college and in california that's what he got and he wrote in his book religion and scientific naturalism in the year two thousand the response i received from repeating b he's claim about the evolutionary literature that it's deficient we simply brings out the point being made implicitly by many others is that i obviously have not read the right box there are i am assured abolitionists who have described how the transitions

in question could have occurred and he continues though when i asked him which looks like and 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 so the point is that they claim that there are darwinian explanations for complex buy books chemical systems is an urban legend when you go to track it down and get it it fades so one more time of my argument has five points that designs of mystical that light strongly looks designed we have no other explanation than design although darwinian claims notwithstanding the bottom line is that we are have strong evidence for design that little evidence for anything else

and the bottom line i think is that a conclusion of intelligent design is rationally justify we have good defensible reasons for concluding design and only promissory notes at best that's something else other than really sein kann can explain things are so i know that when overtime but thanks very much for your patience and your attention you've been listening to michael b professor of biochemistry at lehigh university and one of the most noted defenders of intelligent design he's taught was part of the difficult dialogue series on knowledge faith and reason co sponsored by katie is hall center for the humanities and the biodiversity institute it was recorded december seventh two thousand sex work reading assistance was provided by k u media services and j mcintyre k pr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas set

the light bulb baker urges which are good fall back for that beach illinois what about this issue next time and keep your presents senator howard baker former senate majority leader chief of staff to president ronald reagan ambassador to japan and the winner of the two thousand seven politer surprise join us at eight o'clock sunday evening as senator baker talks about his life in public service including his days on the committee investigating the watergate what law in the first place katie our present state senator howard baker eight o'clock sunday evening on kansas public radio nico

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