The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

In this section, J.P. Moreland (with the help of softball questions obligingly lobbed by Lee Strobel) continues to pour scorn on the idea that the brain could produce consciousness. As in the last installment, his rhetorical strategy is to attack only the weakest and most simplistic hypothesis of how this could occur - to set up a straw man that he can easily push over - and when he's done this, he declares victory and concludes that he's proven human beings must have souls, factory-installed by Jesus at the time of conception.

Strobel has asked what the implications would be if we had no souls. Moreland responds thusly:

"...there would be no free will. That's because matter is completely governed by the laws of nature. Take any physical object... For instance, a cloud," he said. "It's just a material object, and its movement is completely governed by the laws of air pressure, wind movement, and the like. So if I'm a material object, all of the things I do are fixed by my environment, my genetics, and so forth.
    That would mean I'm not really free to make choices. Whatever's going to happen is already rigged by my makeup and environment. So how could you hold me responsible for my behavior if I wasn't free to choose how I would act?" [p.256]

In this passage, Moreland sets up a dilemma: Either my choices are determined by me, or they're determined by the sum total of my causal history and the natural laws operating on me at that moment. It sounds like a convincing argument; but his mistake is in thinking that these are competing positions.

Moreland's narrow and restrictive view of free will requires thinking of himself as a point source of action, a supernatural locus spontaneously originating decisions with no prior cause. In this view, any reason for our actions can only override free will, because reasons are necessarily enmeshed in the causal history of the world. But human beings clearly do have reasons for our actions - in many cases, those reasons are clearly visible. We have a nature, not chosen by us, which primes us to act in certain ways. In Moreland's view, this is a frightening and disturbing idea, for all that it's obviously true.

But what if we draw the boundaries of the self somewhat more broadly? What if I consider myself to be a complex nexus of character traits, dispositions, emotions and reasoning capacity, an animal shaped by evolution and also a human shaped by culture? In that case, the causes that determine my decisions aren't things pressing on me from outside, but part of me, part of the nature that I have. The laws of nature, as well, are not external impositions upon me but simply facts about the way the organic machine that is my brain works.

Moreland's dilemma, therefore, is a false one. We're not something separate from the unfolding of the universe's physical laws. That notion implies that they could "prefer" one outcome while I prefer another, and I could struggle against them in a battle that I would inevitably lose. But that's clearly absurd. I choose what I will, and the laws of nature are part of the explanation for why I had that will in the first place - and this is true no matter what I choose. (See my post series "On Free Will" for more on this view.)

What Moreland seeks is a kind of radical freedom where a person's choices aren't determined by their genetics, their environment, anything in their personal history, or even by the structure of their brain. So what does determine them? The only possible answer, in his view, is that nothing determines them, which is the same as saying that they're random. But how is this an improvement? If our free acts have no causal history to explain them, but arise ex nihilo without rhyme or reason, we haven't established moral responsibility but eliminated it. How can you hold someone responsible for their behavior if their decisions are as random and reasonless as spins of a roulette wheel? Moral responsibility in that scenario would be as futile as blaming the wheel for landing on double 0 when you were betting on black. It's the materialist view, which roots our decisions firmly in the causal weave of the world, that provides the most solid basis for true moral responsibility. When a person errs, we can find the cause of their wrong decision, and then change the way they make decisions - through persuasion, through punishment, or through any other method - so that they will not be caused to make similar bad choices in the future.

"So if the materialists are right, kiss free will good-bye. In their view, we're just very complicated computers that behave according to the laws of nature and the programming we receive. But, Lee, obviously they're wrong - we do have free will. We all know that deep down inside." [p.256]

For a book that claims to be based on science, this is a very peculiar mode of argument. Compare: "My colleagues in the academy, my eleven-dimensional supersymmetric string theory explaining dark matter and unifying gravity with the other physical forces is true. I don't have any evidence, but you all know it deep down inside."

"You already know I'm right" may be an effective argument for Strobel's intended readership: the Christian cheering section who already agrees with him and needs only the thinnest excuse to start nodding vigorously. But to convince people who don't already agree with everything you believe, you need hard evidence - you need science. Strobel and Moreland don't even attempt to provide that here. Obviously, a hard determinist would say that this "feeling" of personal freedom is an illusion, that we're determined in advance to feel that way just as all our other feelings and desires are determined. Moreland has nothing to counter that explanation, which is why he retreats into bald assertion.

To close out the chapter, Moreland offers what he thinks is evidence for the soul. He tells an unlikely story of how the Pentagon, during the Vietnam War, was supposedly basing its military strategy on B.F. Skinner's behaviorism. Because of this, he says, they believed that victory was certain if we dropped enough bombs, because eventually the negative stimuli of the bombing had to condition the North Vietnamese army into surrender:

"It didn't work... [b]ecause there was more to the Vietnamese than their physical brains responding to stimuli. They have souls, desires, feelings and beliefs, and they could make free choices to suffer and to stand firm for their convictions despite our attempt to condition them by our bombing." [p.256]

With this passage, Moreland has not only dodged the obvious counterarguments, he's sprinting far past them into the distance, leaving a curl of dust as he vanishes over the horizon. He argues as if Skinnerian behaviorism is the only possible theory of non-supernatural decision-making, and if it's shown to be false, then we have no alternative but to conclude we have souls, God exists, and Jesus died for our sins.

?! Has it ever crossed his mind that there's more than one possible hypothesis to explain how a physical brain makes decisions? Does he really think there's no materialistic way to account for the obvious fact, denied by no one, that some people hold fast to a chosen cause despite suffering for it? You might as well say that I should be able to make a computer do whatever I tell it by sending electric shocks through its CPU, and if that doesn't work, it proves that my computer is run by magical elves that are immune to electricity.

Since I apparently need to, permit to recount the obvious truths about human nature which Moreland fantasizes that materialists deny. Human beings are not flatworms responding blindly to stimuli, but reasoning creatures with a highly developed neocortex capable of abstract goals and long-term planning. We do possess the same basic drives - hunger, lust, aversion to pain - as all other animals, but we, unlike most species, can hold those drives in check by using our ability to anticipate the future, delaying immediate gratification in the name of achieving a larger goal. Nothing about this is incompatible with the brain being a physical machine.

Humans also aren't the only creatures capable of this. Consider the famous experiment where one monkey voluntarily starved itself, in one case for days on end, rather than pull a chain that would dispense food but would also give an electric shock to a monkey in an adjacent cage. Skinner's behaviorism fares poorly at explaining this. Does this mean that monkeys must also have souls?

Actually, he does think that - and the way I know this is the strangest part of this book yet. A bit later in the chapter, Moreland veers off into an utterly bizarre tangent about whether animals have souls. He says they do (which we know because "[i]n several places the Bible uses the word 'soul' or 'spirit' when discussing animals" [p.262]). But according to him, the difference between us is that humans are capable of "free moral action", while animal souls are "determined" (those monkeys sounded a lot like they were performing free moral actions to me); and also, "the animal soul ceases to exist at death" [p.263].

For a book that claims to be based on science, this sudden detour into angels-dancing-on-pinheads theological fantasy is as jarringly misplaced as it would be to find a passage on voodoo rituals inserted into the middle of a calculus text. It confirms, again, that what we have here is not an actual recounting of what science has discovered, but an exercise in Christian theology dressed up in just enough scientific language to fool people who don't know the difference.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

The essence of science isn't test tubes or lab coats, but a special kind of scrupulous intellectual honesty. It's the willingness to try to prove yourself wrong, to subject your own ideas to the most rigorous, make-or-break tests you can conceive of. Equally as important, it's the willingness to consider every plausible alternative and weigh them all fairly - and if a competing hypothesis explains the data better than your own, to acknowledge that and respond accordingly.

This is a standard that this book doesn't meet, and chapter 10 shows why. A recurring theme of this chapter is that Strobel and Moreland consider only the simplest possible hypotheses of how the brain causes consciousness - and when they identify a weakness, they conclude that not just that hypothesis, but all the more complex alternatives as well, are false.

In this section, Strobel has asked, "What positive evidence is there that consciousness and the self are not merely a physical product of the brain?" Here's how Moreland responds:

"For example, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk, or swallow. Invariably the patient would respond by saying, 'I didn't do that. You did.'....
No matter how much Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, he said, 'There is no place... where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.' That's because those functions originate in the conscious self, not the brain." [p.258]

This argument only works if you assume an extremely simplistic model of consciousness: that beliefs and decisions originate from one single spot in the brain, and by poking that spot, you can activate the processes that produce them. But this is unlikely in any plausible materialistic view of consciousness. It's much more likely that these higher-order functions involve the coordinated activity of many brain regions, since after all, forming a belief or making a decision necessarily requires integrating many different sources of input. In fact, Moreland's view that simple electrical stimulation should produce beliefs and decisions would make more sense under a Christian view of the brain - like that of Descartes, who believed there was a single anatomical region (the pineal gland) where the brain interfaced with the soul and received its marching orders.

But you'll notice that Moreland, unintentionally I'm sure, has committed himself to a completely testable claim: if we have a soul, our beliefs and decisions originate there and not in the brain. Therefore, it's a necessary consequence of his view that no physical alteration of the brain, whether caused by accident, disease or anything else, should cause a person to believe or decide in a particular way.

Well, if that's his challenge, I'm happy to take him up on it. It may be that Penfield's crude electrical stimulation didn't cause his patients to form beliefs or make decisions, but there are many types of brain disorders that do exactly this. I'll list a few, all of which are described in greater detail in my essay "A Ghost in the Machine":

Capgras' syndrome: Sometimes occurs in people suffering from schizophrenia, dementia, or head injury. The patient suddenly begins to insist that a friend or loved one has been replaced by an impostor who looks and acts exactly like the missing individual. This meets Moreland's criterion of brain injury causing a person to believe.

Frontotemporal dementia: A disease similar to Alzheimer's that causes degeneration in the frontal lobes of the brain. Individuals suffering from the early stages of FTD have been known to show dramatic changes in their personal likes and dislikes, political preferences, and even their religion. This meets Moreland's criterion of brain injury causing a person to decide.

Environmental dependency syndrome: Often caused by tumors pressing on the frontal lobes or other types of frontal lobe dysfunction. Patients with this disorder act as if their behavior is governed by external cues rather than internal decisions. They also show dramatically reduced impulse control, often choosing to act in ways they previously never would have done. One famous case is Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman who survived a freak accident that destroyed part of the frontal loes of his brain, but in the aftermath, baffled his friends and family by transforming from a diligent, well-respected worker to a lazy, shiftless drifter.

Akinesia: Unlike paralysis, the inability to move, akinesia is the unwillingness to move. Akinesia sufferers lose the motivation to do anything except respond to the most immediate needs. Again, this condition is often caused by tumors or brain damage. One case I detail in my essay is of a Baptist preacher who quit his church because he no longer felt like going to work. When a surgeon removed a tumor pressing on his frontal lobes, he soon regained his motivation and returned to work.

All these disorders, and others like them, are totally inexplicable on Moreland's view. If the soul is the source of belief and decision and is not dependent on the brain, as he insists, then we should never find cases like this. On the dualist view, we might expect to find cases where the soul's "lines of communication" to the body were cut by brain damage, but that should only produce effects like paralysis or coma, not actual alterations to a person's desires and personality. But the dualist view clashes with reality. In cases like the ones I've described, people can still do exactly what they want; the problem is that what they want has changed.

Strobel and Moreland never address evidence like this, so it's hard to tell how they would respond to it. The thoroughly mechanistic nature of consciousness, and the fact that it can be changed by changing the brain, as surely as a computer can be reprogrammed, is evidence that Christian apologists in general haven't acknowledged or come to terms with. But to anyone who's familiar with the discoveries of modern neuroscience, the idea that beliefs and decisions originate somewhere other than the brain, in some separate and supernatural "conscious self", is as laughable as the idea that mental illness is caused by demonic possession.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

Chapter 10 of Case, which concerns human consciousness and the brain, is an interview with J.P. Moreland, a Christian philosopher and theologian. Like many of Strobel's other interview subjects, Moreland is not a scientist and has no scientific credentials to speak of - this despite Strobel's initial boast that he'll be interviewing "authorities" [p.28] in the relevant fields.

I've already pointed out how Strobel tries to put a positive gloss on his interviewees' backgrounds to make them seem more like scientists, but his attempt to inflate Moreland's academic credentials is particularly hilarious:

Moreland's science training came at the University of Missouri, where he received a degree in chemistry. He was subsequently awarded the top fellowship for a doctorate in nuclear chemistry at the University of Colorado but declined the honor to pursue a different path. He then earned a master's degree in theology at Dallas Theological Seminary and a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Southern California. [p.253]

Amazing! So now everyone who has an undergraduate degree in chemistry is a scientific authority. Who knew?

This is the final interview of the book, which is fortunate for Strobel, since he's really scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. If the book had gone on any longer, he'd probably be reduced to claiming that some Bible-thumping Christian theologian is a scientific authority because he learned Newton's laws in high school. And please note, even if Moreland had been a master chemist, that field is still completely irrelevant to the subject of this chapter! Why is it that Strobel couldn't find even one actual neuroscientist who was willing to speak to him?

This credential inflation is a direct and necessary consequence of the ideological straitjacket that Strobel has forced the text into. Throughout this book, it's clearly demonstrated that he doesn't conduct adversarial interviews; he only seeks out people who already have the same opinions as him, so the "interview" is just a matter of asking the right questions to give them an opportunity to regurgitate those opinions. This approach rules out interviewing more qualified people who genuinely do dissent from the orthodoxy in significant ways, such as the philosopher John Searle, who's quoted in the beginning of the chapter as follows:

"You can expand the [computing] power all you want, hooking up as many computers as you think you need, and they still won't be conscious, because all they'll ever do is shuffle symbols." [p.248]

The problem, in Strobel's eyes, is that even though Searle dissents from the mainstream view of consciousness, he's not an evangelical Christian. (He's actually an atheist.) Therefore, he can be quote-mined, but no more than that; he must be kept at arm's length and can't be given the opportunity to express his actual views. This restricts Strobel's potential interview subjects to the very small set of people who are not only orthodox evangelical Christians, but are willing to put that belief ahead of their scientific research. It seems that there's no one at all in the field of neuroscience who fits that description, which is why Strobel is reduced to interviewing a Christian theologian with no scientific credentials and trying to pass him off as an authority on the brain.

Lastly, I want to point out the curious fact that, according to Strobel, Moreland was offered a fellowship to get his Ph.D, but turned it down in order to attend seminary. Why is that, I wonder? Is it remotely possible that he realized succeeding in the field of chemistry requires actual, concrete results... while being a theologian tends to be a cushy job which makes few demands on its practitioners and has no objective measure of success? Such is the intellectual waste produced by the non-subject of theology, a field of inquiry possessing not a single piece of verifiable data. Countless minds, many of them quite brilliant and perfectly capable of producing something of benefit to humanity, have been squandered in the idle and futile speculations of religion.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 9

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

—attributed to Isaac Asimov

Although science progresses through reason and experiment, it's fundamentally driven by curiosity. The impulse that motivates science is the same one that motivates explorers to trek into uncharted wildernesses and climb unconquered mountains, the same one that spurred ancient tribes to paddle over to the next island or cross the next river: the human desire to know, to grasp the totality of the natural world and understand the patterns and connections that flow within it. This sense of curiosity, the urge to explore for exploration's sake, inspires a range of human activities from children digging in the dirt to astrophysicists sending probes to the outer reaches of the solar system.

This is a trait that's noticeably lacking in the creationist movement. Rather than form hypotheses and run experiments, rather than do research and discover new evidence, the dominant attitude among creationists seems to be: it's too hard, you'll never be able to figure it out, don't even bother. I earlier called this attitude "strategic pessimism", but I think it runs deeper than that. In chapter 9, Stephen Meyer shows why.

In this part of the chapter, Meyer is talking with Lee Strobel about the Cambrian explosion. He insists on describing it as a sudden appearance of radically new, fully formed body plans, and asserts, with zero evidence or even a footnote, that the period of the Cambrian explosion was "far too short to have allowed for the kind of large-scale changes that the fossils reflect" [p.240]. I've already discussed Jonathan Wells' similar confusion about the Cambrian explosion, so I won't repeat those remarks. Instead, I want to focus on one remark in particular that Meyer makes.

"The big issue is where did the information come from to build all these new proteins, cells, and body plans? For instance, Cambrian animals would have needed complex proteins, such as lysyl oxidase. In animals today, lysyl oxidase molecules require four hundred amino acids. Where did the genetic information come from to build these complicated molecules?" [p.240]

Now, if you were a scientist, this is just the kind of question that could spur a research program. You could ask questions like: Does lysyl oxidase show sequence similarities to other proteins from which it plausibly could have evolved? If so, do these similar proteins exist in bacteria or in other species that predated the Cambrian explosion, and what are they used for in those species? You could draw a family tree of all the living species that have genes for lysyl oxidase, and see if there are any commonalities that point to the protein's being inherited from a single common ancestor. Given this family tree, you could see if the genetic sequences that encode the protein are different in related species, and from this, you could use molecular clock methods to estimate how long ago the protein first evolved.

Answering all these questions would be a major feat of scientific legwork. Here's most of what we know about lysyl oxidase - you can see for yourself how much effort it took just to work out the molecular structure of the protein, what types of tissue it's expressed in, and what it does in the cell. Meyer is asking a much more difficult question, one which would require a correspondingly greater amount of effort to answer.

Of course, he isn't volunteering to carry out this research himself. But what's striking about this passage is that he's not encouraging anyone else to do so either. Instead, he's actively discouraging people from trying to find out. His question - where did the genetic information come from? - clearly isn't intended as an honest question in search of an answer, but as a rhetorical query meant to paralyze us with the sheer overwhelming complexity it implies. It's impossible to figure this out, he's saying, so why even try? Just say that God did it in a miracle and then call it a day!

This is the exact opposite of the impulse that gives rise to science - not the enlightening spark of curiosity that drives us to make new discoveries, but the desire to remain in the dark and stay ignorant, to be easily discouraged by anything we don't already understand. I don't think English has a good word for this, so let's call it "anticuriosity".

Anticuriosity is the hallmark of the creationist movement. They believe that they already have a one-size-fits-all answer for any question - God did it, it was a miracle, impossible for us to explain or understand - and naturally, that mindset doesn't encourage scientific exploration. Why would you encourage people to be skeptical and ask questions if you already possess Absolute Truth? Why encourage them to explore if you already have all the important answers that anyone ever needs to know? Why bother doing research or experiments if you already know ahead of time what the conclusion has to be? At best such activity will accomplish nothing, and at worst, it will inspire people to doubt and to undermine the all-important social order.

I'm not saying this is how Meyer consciously thinks, but I am saying that this is the attitude his interview conveys. And he's by no means the first Christian apologist to take this position. John Milton's Paradise Lost expresses the same view several hundred years earlier, as in this section from book 8, where the angel Raphael explains to Adam that it would be hubris for human beings to try to figure out whether the Earth orbits the Sun, or vice versa:

"This to attain, whether Heaven move or Earth
Imports not, if thou reckon right; the rest
From Man or Angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets, to be scanned by them who ought
Rather admire. Or, if they list to try
Conjecture, he his fabric of the Heavens
Hath left to their disputes - perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions...

Heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there. Be lowly wise;
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not to other worlds, what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree -
Contented that thus far hath been revealed
Not of Earth only, but of highest Heaven."

You couldn't ask for a more concise description of anticuriosity. In every era, there are religious apologists urging us to stop exploring the natural world, to stop pushing back the borders of our knowledge. Thankfully, in every era there have been freethinkers who ignored this advice and followed their curiosity - and so far, our exploration has been more than repaid every time.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 9

How likely is the spontaneous origin of life? In chapter 9, Stephen Meyer likens it to one of those tornado-in-a-junkyard scenarios that creationists love so much:

"Imagine trying to generate even a simple book by throwing Scrabble letters onto the floor. Or imagine closing your eyes and picking Scrabble letters out of a bag. Are you going to produce Hamlet in anything like the time of the known universe?" [p.229]

Obviously, the answer is no. Almost as obviously, however, this is not a question that bears on the origin of life.

Let's see how Meyer's facile comparison holds up if we put some actual numbers on it. I downloaded Hamlet from Project Gutenberg and did a character count on the text file. Not counting spaces, punctuation or the copyright notice, I came up with a total of 129,839 characters. Since the alphabet has 26 letters, it takes a minimum of 5 bits to specify any single letter, which means that Hamlet has (129,839 x 5) = 649,195 bits of information.

To contrast to this, consider the smallest known genome: Carsonella ruddii, a bacterium that lives in the guts of leaf-eating insects called psyllids. It has only about 160,000 base pairs of DNA, coding for 182 proteins. But since there are only 4 base pairs in DNA, it takes only 2 bits to specify each one, which means that Carsonella's genome contains (160,000 x 2) = 320,000 bits of information: less than half of Hamlet! And Carsonella is the smallest modern genome. The very first life, which was probably little more than a self-replicating hypercycle of molecules, would have been smaller still.

Obviously, this analogy is still rigged in Meyer's favor: neither evolution nor the laws of chemistry are very much like picking Scrabble tiles out of a bag. The laws of English are such that the vast majority of possible arrangements of letters are meaningless gibberish, but this is not true of proteins and DNA. Because a protein's function is defined by its shape, virtually every possible string of amino acids potentially "means something" in a way that random combinations of English letters don't. In the primordial sea, there would have been billions of different molecules drifting around, bumping up against each other, interacting in countless ways. Until we know the smallest possible interacting set of molecules that could be called alive - and we don't know that, at least not yet - there's no basis for any claim about how likely it would have been for such a thing to arise by chance.

"There's a minimal complexity threshold... There's a certain level of folding that a protein has to have, called tertiary structure, that is necessary for it to perform a function. You don't get tertiary structure in a protein unless you have at least seventy-five amino acids or so. That may be conservative. Now consider what you'd need for a protein molecule to form by chance.

First, you need the right bonds between the amino acids. Second, amino acids come in right-handed and left-handed versions, and you've got to get only left-handed ones.

Creationists are fond of invoking this "handedness" problem (the technical term is "chirality"). It refers to the fact that certain organic molecules like sugars and amino acids naturally come in two stable configurations that are mirror images of each other, like your left and right hand. Most living things use only left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars, and creationists often suggest that no natural force could produce this bias.

But, in fact, there's a wide variety of natural mechanisms that can sort molecules by chirality. Some common crystals, such as calcite, selectively absorb molecules of one handedness on one crystal face and the other handedness on the opposing face. (The chirality of all modern life may simply be because that vital first set of chemical reactions occurred on one side of a rock rather than another.) Circularly polarized ultraviolet light also selectively destroys molecules of one handedness. (The Murchison meteorite, which contains amino acids produced in the early solar system, has an imbalance of left-handed amino acids, and some scientists feel it's for precisely this reason. See also.) There's also a chemistry principle called "majority rule" in which certain reactions that begin with a weakly chiral mixture can produce products that are strongly chiral. Some scientists even believe that the laws of physics are not completely symmetric and one chirality is energetically favored over the other. Any of these mechanisms, or several of them in combination, could plausibly be why life has one chirality and not the other. We don't know the true cause for certain - but it's not that we have no idea how it could have happened; it's that we have too many candidates and can't choose among them!

"Third, the amino acids must link up in a specified sequence, like letters in a sentence.

Run the odds of these things falling into place on their own and you find that the probabilities of forming a rather short functional protein at random would be one chance in a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That's a ten with 125 zeroes after it!" [p.229]

There's no explanation of how Meyer got these numbers (again, footnotes are absent just where they'd be most helpful). But I strongly suspect he's committing the poker player's fallacy again: assuming that only one amino acid sequence can provide the function he wants. His mention of "a specified sequence" implies as much. But in any plausible origin-of-life scenario, there wouldn't be one miracle sequence, but a large number of functionally equivalent sequences. We already know this to be true in modern life: a large percentage of mutations are neither positive nor negative but neutral, having no effect on the overall shape or functioning of the protein.

But if Meyer's numbers are right, it should be easy to prove in an experiment: just generate some organic molecules at random and see what happens. If he's correct, nothing interesting or useful will ever emerge. Well, unlike creationists comfortably ensconced in their armchairs, real scientists do run experiments like this. From a Usenet post by the biologist Howard Hershey:

Random syntheses of 50 nucleotide long RNAs generates certain specific selectable functional ribozyme (RNA enzyme) activities relevant to biological functions that would be needed for an ur-organism (RNA ligases, terminal transferases, etc.) in the range of once every 10¹⁴-10¹⁷ molecules (a mole of molecules is about 10²³, so it is a virtual certainty that you will have a number of molecules with the needed activities in a millimole of such randomly generated RNA (you would certainly be able to hold this in a thimble). Moreover, ALL these activities would be present in the SAME millimole of RNA.

For technical details, see this similar paper from the journal Science: "Structurally Complex and Highly Active RNA Ligases Derived from Random RNA Sequences". The authors say, "The fact that such a large and complex ligase emerged from a very limited sampling of sequence space implies the existence of a large number of distinct RNA structures of equivalent complexity and activity."

To put this in layman's terms: a thimbleful of randomly generated RNA sequences contains numerous enzymes with an interesting variety of biologically relevant abilities. This is a far cry from Meyer's "ten with 125 zeroes after it". Either nature is pulling a prank on us by defying the odds every single time, or else the ID advocates' calculations are based on unrealistic assumptions. Note that these RNA enzymes were only 50 nucleotides long - shorter than Meyer's "minimal complexity threshold" of 75 amino acids or more - and yet were still able to perform biologically interesting functions. And for any plausible origin-of-life scenario, we're not talking about a thimbleful of molecules, but a whole planet's worth.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 is ostensibly about the origin of biological information, but what it's really about is the origin of life. We've discussed this in part in an earlier chapter, but Meyer has some other objections to raise.

First up, Strobel raises the question of the "prebiotic soup" - the dilute broth of organic molecules that's believed to have existed in the Earth's oceans before the origin of life, a fitting stage for many kinds of complex chemical reactions. This is a plausible environment for abiogenesis to take place, so Meyer tries to sow some doubt:

"I hear scientists talk a lot about this prebiotic soup," I said. "How much evidence is there that it actually existed?"

"That's a very interesting issue," he replied. "The answer is there isn't any evidence... If this prebiotic soup had really existed... it would have been rich in amino acids. Therefore, there would have been a lot of nitrogen, because amino acids are nitrogenous. So when we examine the earliest sediments of the Earth, we should find large deposits of nitrogen-rich minerals... Those deposits have never been located." [p.227]

There's no footnote for this, and I find it a puzzling and implausible argument. Earth today contains billions of tons of organic molecules locked up in life. But the Earth is a closed system. Aside from negligible contributions by comets and meteorites, the atoms on this planet today are the same ones that were here when it was first formed. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we know from Miller-Urey-type experiments that organic molecules like amino acids readily form in the presence of a source of energy. How could there not have been a prebiotic soup? What does Meyer imagine all those molecules were doing prior to the origin of life? (Then again, as I pointed out in chapter 4, Meyer appears to be a believer in the young-earth mythology - so maybe the alternative he's really trying to push is the Garden of Eden.)

Meyer also fails to qualify his mention of "earliest sediments". The earliest sediments, if by that he means sedimentary rocks of the same age as the origin of life, do not exist: erosion and plate tectonics tend to destroy and recycle the very oldest rocks. Most of the oldest surviving rocks that we possess are zircons, tiny mineral grains that form in igneous and metamorphic rocks. Zircons can be radiometrically dated, and some are known that are over 4 billion years old, but they don't offer any clues as to when life got started.

The oldest geologic evidence of life is significantly later. There are fossil stromatolites about 3.45 billion years old in rocks from the Warrawoona Group of Western Australia, which is the oldest clear evidence of living things. More controversially, there are rocks from Greenland about 3.85 billion years old that may contain "chemofossils". Living things concentrate the C-12 carbon isotope, rather than the slightly heavier C-13. These rocks show that same altered ratio, which could be a chemical marker left by early life. Evidence this subtle is still being debated by the scientific community, and given the extensive recycling of the Earth's oldest rocks, it's not reasonable to expect "large deposits" of nitrogen-rich minerals dating back to the origin of life to have survived.

Meyer has only one source to back up all of this, and it's a real laugh riot:

"In fact, Jim Brooks wrote in 1985 that 'the nitrogen content of early organic matter is relatively low - just .015 percent.' He said in Origins of Life: 'From this we can be reasonably certain that there never was any substantial amount of 'primitive soup' on Earth when pre-Cambrian sediments were formed; if such a soup ever existed it was only for a brief period of time.'" [p.227]

Strobel labels this an "astounding conclusion", but what he should be more astounded by is how far Meyer had to stretch to find a source for this claim. Wanting to verify this, I did a search for Jim Brooks' Origins of Life, only to find that it's long out of print according to several online booksellers. But more comical is that Strobel cites the publisher of this book as "Lion" - which I found out is Lion Hudson, which is, in fact, a Christian publishing house. A twenty-year-old, out-of-print book by a Christian publisher - that's the most reliable source that could be found to back up these assertions! Couldn't Meyer find even one actual scientific source to quote-mine?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of Case is about abiogenesis. It seems Strobel couldn't find any actual molecular biologists or organic chemists who support ID and were willing to speak with him about it, so it's back for another talk with Stephen Meyer, the philosopher already interviewed in chapter 4. With cheerful ludicrousness, Strobel describes Meyer, who is not a biologist and has never published a single piece of research on this topic, as "one of the country's leading experts on origin-of-life issues" [p.221] - which is like saying that Kent Hovind is one of the country's leading experts on tax law.

I want to quote some more of Strobel's rapturous verbiage about Meyer's intellectual prowess, to give you a sense of just how over-the-top and obnoxious it is:

In fact, I once hosted the videotaping of an intellectual shoot-out between Meyer and an atheistic anthropologist on the legitimacy of intelligent-design theories, and I remember walking away amazed at Meyer's finesse in deftly dismantling the professor's case while at the same time forcefully presenting his own. Maybe that's a throwback to Meyer's earlier years when he trained as a boxer, learning to overcome fears of taking a punch and how to jab away at an opponent's weakness. [p.222]

Creationists certainly love to describe how wonderfully convincing and compelling their arguments are. In some cases, they love doing it so much that they never actually get around to making the argument. And it's a given that Lee Strobel would never declare any debate between a creationist and a scientist to be anything less than a total victory for creationism. But I noticed something important missing from that paragraph: a footnote.

There are plenty of other footnotes throughout this chapter, but for some reason, Strobel never gives us a reference or a URL to this debate, never tells us where it was, when it was, or even who it was against. If it was such a total victory for ID as he claims, why doesn't he give his readers the tools to view it for themselves so they can see just how decisively Meyer trounced the other side? Could it be that he actually thinks the scientist won the debate, despite what he says? Or, more likely, he just doesn't want his readers to see any unfiltered pro-evolution argument in a format that creationists don't completely control. (As we saw last time, creationists tend to fare poorly in those encounters.) He'd prefer his readers serve as a cheering section, rather than giving them any information that might encourage those pesky tendencies toward critical thinking.

What Strobel also doesn't see fit to mention is that his re-interview of Stephen Meyer is likely because, at this point in the book, he's interviewed nearly every prominent figure in the intelligent-design movement. At the beginning of the book, he boasted of the parade of experts he would put on display - but it seems he couldn't fill out even ten chapters without repeating himself, and even then, the list had to be padded with philosophy professors, theologians and professional Christian apologists.

Strobel's defenders would doubtless say that there are other people he could have interviewed, such as two more names mentioned in the introduction to this chapter:

The astounding capacity of microscopic DNA to harbor this mountain of information... "vastly exceeds that of any other known system," said geneticist Michael Denton. [p.221]

...biology professor Dean Kenyon repudiate[d] the conclusions of his own book and the chemical origin of life and conclude[d] instead that nothing short of an intelligence could have created this intricate cellular apparatus. [p.222]

Yet I suspect there are reasons why Strobel chose not to include either of these two. Denton, for example, was once an ardent anti-evolutionist who wrote books like Evolution: A Theory in Crisis - but his newest book, Nature's Destiny, completely reverses course and instead argues that the laws of the cosmos are fine-tuned so as to make evolution (and the appearance of humans) inevitable. This position has significant similarities to ID, to be sure, but it also strays from the "abrupt appearance" evangelical-Christian orthodoxy that's promoted throughout the book, so it's not surprising that Denton isn't given a chance to speak here. (Jonathan Wells, the Moonie, and Michael Behe, the Roman Catholic, seem to be the farthest that Strobel is prepared to go in the name of ecumenism.)

The other name, Dean Kenyon, is more interesting. He's that rarest of rare birds, a creationist who actually has a degree in biology (Ph.D in biophysics from Stanford, 1965). On the face of it, he seems like an ideal choice for a book like this. But Strobel skips him, too, and I think this may have something to do with it:

It is my professional opinion, based on my original research, study, and teaching, that creation-science is as scientific as evolution, although it currently does not have the benefit of the volume of research that has been carried out under evolutionist presuppositions.... Moreover, I believe that a scientifically sound creationist view of origins is not only possible, but is to be preferred over the evolutionary view.

Kenyon was a major participant in the original intelligent-design movement - back when it was still called "scientific creationism". The Supreme Court dealt the decisive blow to that in Edwards v. Aguillard, which held that creationism was unconstitutional to teach in public schools. Almost immediately thereafter, the movement reconstituted itself as "intelligent design". Perhaps Strobel felt that interviewing Kenyon would be treading on dangerous ground as regards the ID movement's history. (The original proponents of scientific creationism also argued strenuously in court that their ideas were not religious, as you can see from Kenyon's affidavit.)

For all its boastful claims, the actual ID movement is quite small, and Strobel's being forced to return to the same interview subject shows it. He tries his best to create the illusion of parity, to imply that there are just as many experts supporting ID as evolution, but we've already seen the deceptiveness of that. Try as he might to make the ID movement seem a mile wide, it will still only be an inch deep, and in no way comparable to the vast amounts of actual research, knowledge, and expertise within evolutionary theory.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 8

The best place to settle a scientific debate is in the peer-reviewed journals and the larger research community - a strategy which, as we've noted, the creationists have steered well clear of. This means, when they inevitably attempt to push their beliefs into public schools anyway, that we have to take them to court, and that's where most direct encounters between science and creationism take place.

However, though it's not an ideal forum for the advancement of scientific knowledge, the trial format does have its advantages. For one thing, we can cross-examine creationist witnesses and force them to answer direct questions - an opportunity not available on the internet, where they can hunker down behind the ramparts of their blogs and avoid all hostile or critical feedback. And when they've been put to the test in this way, they haven't come out of the experience covered in glory.

In chapter 8, Lee Strobel gives Michael Behe the opportunity to repeatedly make assertions like this one:

"Complex biological systems have yet to be explained by naturalistic means. That's a fact." [p.216]

In the cozy environment of Strobel's interview, this claim meets with no skepticism. Not a hint is given that evolutionary biologists have made any progress in explaining the origin of any complex biological system. But on another occasion, Behe had to defend these views in a considerably less friendly forum, and he didn't fare nearly as well.

In 2004, the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania voted to include references to intelligent design in their biology curriculum. The ensuing lawsuit, Kitzmiller v. Dover, became a landmark in the evolution wars - not least because several prominent creationists agreed to appear as witnesses for the defense, among them Michael Behe.

The Talk.Origins Archive has complete trial transcripts, which you can read through if you want. However, I want to highlight an exchange from day 12, when Behe was cross-examined by Eric Rothschild, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Behe had claimed in his testimony that "the scientific literature has no detailed testable answers to the question of how the immune system could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection".

Even compared to all the other falsehoods told by Behe, this stands out as his wrongest claim yet. The origin of the immune system has been a topic of active research for decades, and we've made enormous strides in our understanding of how it evolved. The key hypothesis, called the transposon hypothesis, makes several surprising predictions that have been verified by subsequent work. This seemed the ideal point to attack Behe when he took the witness stand, which led to this exchange:

Q. I'm going to read some titles here. We have Evolution of Immune Reactions by Sima and Vetvicka, are you familiar with that?

A. No, I'm not.

Q. Origin and Evolution of the Vertebrate Immune System, by Pasquier. Evolution and Vertebrate Immunity, by Kelso. The Primordial Vrm System and the Evolution of Vertebrate Immunity, by Stewart. The Phylogenesis of Immune Functions, by Warr. The Evolutionary Mechanisms of Defense Reactions, by Vetvicka. Immunity and Evolution, Marchalonias. Immunology of Animals, by Vetvicka. You need some room here. Can you confirm these are books about the evolution of the immune system?

A. Most of them have evolution or related words in the title, so I can confirm that, but what I strongly doubt is that any of these address the question in a rigorous detailed fashion of how the immune system or irreducibly complex components of it could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection.

...Q. There's also books on the immune system that have chapters on the evolution of the immune system?

A. Yes, and my same comment would apply to those.

Q. I'm just going to read these titles, it sounds like you don't even need to look at them?

A. Please do go ahead and read them.

Q. You've got Immune System Accessory Cells, Fornusek and Vetvicka, and that's got a chapter called "Evolution of Immune Sensory Functions." You've got a book called The Natural History of the Major Histocompatability Complex, that's part of the immune system, correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And here we've got chapter called "Evolution." Then we've got Fundamental Immunology, a chapter on the evolution of the immune system.

A lot of writing, huh?

A. Well, these books do seem to have the titles that you said, and I'm sure they have the chapters in them that you mentioned as well, but again I am quite skeptical, although I haven't read them, that in fact they present detailed rigorous models for the evolution of the immune system by random mutation and natural selection.

Q. You haven't read those chapters?

A. No, I haven't.

Q. You haven't read the books that I gave you?

A. No, I haven't. I have read those papers that I presented though yesterday on the immune system.

Q. And the fifty-eight articles, some yes, some no?

A. Well, the nice thing about science is that oftentimes when you read the latest articles, or a sampling of the latest articles, they certainly include earlier results. So you get up to speed pretty quickly. You don't have to go back and read every article on a particular topic for the last fifty years or so.

Q. And all of these materials I gave you and, you know, those, including those you've read, none of them in your view meet the standard you set for literature on the evolution of the immune system? No scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system?

A. Again in the context of that chapter, I meant no answers, no detailed rigorous answers to the question of how the immune system could arise by random mutation and natural selection, and yes, in my, in the reading I have done I have not found any such studies.

The list of books and papers that Rothschild piled up on the witness stand, as you can see from the photograph, is extensive, and Behe admitted that he hadn't read any of them. Yet despite this, he continued to insist that it was not possible that any of them contained an explanation good enough to satisfy him. If you want to see the list for yourself, the NCSE has an annotated bibliography - listing all the titles and excerpting their subject matter, to show how they directly address the origin of the immune system - the kind of detailed, testable scientific hypothesis that, according to Behe, does not exist. (See also Evolving Immunity.)

After forty days and forty nights of testimony (really), the Kitzmiller trial concluded, and Judge John E. Jones - a conservative George W. Bush appointee - issued a strongly worded decision which concluded that ID was religion, not science, and that teaching it in public school would be an unconstitutional state endorsement of religion. Behe's testimony was singled out for criticism, as Judge Jones wrote:

...in Darwin’s Black Box, Professor Behe wrote that not only were there no natural explanations for the immune system at the time, but that natural explanations were impossible regarding its origin. However, Dr. Miller presented peer-reviewed studies refuting Professor Behe’s claim that the immune system was irreducibly complex. Between 1996 and 2002, various studies confirmed each element of the evolutionary hypothesis explaining the origin of the immune system. In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fiftyeight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.”

Christian apologists like Lee Strobel go out of their way to present ID advocates in the best possible light, asking them easy, leading questions and ensuring that their answers go uncriticized and unchallenged. But in an open environment where they don't control the terms of the debate and must confront the evidence, creationists meet with disaster time and time again. Is it any wonder that scientists have little regard for ID advocates, considering that their major arguments, like fragile hothouse flowers, must be carefully shielded from contact with the evidence lest they collapse?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

You may have heard that, after an exasperating series of setbacks and delays, the massive particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running. Even in preliminary tests, it's set records for the most powerful particle collisions ever recorded in a lab - and when it's reactivated later this year, it's expected to set new ones.

Recently, I was struck by this quote from a National Geographic article on the LHC:

So far, the CERN team has been very cautious as it ramps up toward full power — and that's a good thing, said Fermilab's [Dan] Green.

Even if caution means that it takes a while for experiments to start, Green said, "I've been in this business for more than 20 years. I can wait a little longer."

When I read that, I was reminded of the medieval cathedral builders - the architects who embarked on these grand projects knowing, or so the story goes, that they wouldn't see them to completion in their own lifetime. This selfless labor produced some magnificent architecture - but while I admire the beauty of great cathedrals, ultimately they're sterile; they produce nothing of tangible benefit to humanity. But the same is not true of the great modern scientific experiments, the cathedrals of our time. These grand projects, while built on the same soaring scale and evoking the same reactions of awe and wonder, prove their worth by producing knowledge that expands our vision of the cosmos and humanity's own place in it.

Image via. Note the relative size of the workers at bottom left.

At right is a photo of ATLAS, one of the six particle detectors installed in the Large Hadron Collider and currently the single largest one of its kind ever built. Like an onion, ATLAS is constructed as a series of concentric layers, each one designed to detect and measure different aspects of the different kinds of particles produced by collisions in the LHC - superconducting magnets to bend the path of charged particles and reveal their momentum, calorimeters to absorb particles and record their energy, others to record radiation, velocity, electric charge, and so on. ATLAS is about half the size of the Notre Dame Cathedral, weighs 7,000 tons - about the same as the Eiffel Tower - and running at full capacity, can generate one petabyte - one million gigabytes - of raw data per second. (A network of computers will process this deluge of data to filter out the relatively tiny fraction of events that are of interest for further processing.)

Among other discoveries, ATLAS and the LHC are hoped to make the first conclusive detection of the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that may explain the existence of mass. If more esoteric ideas in physics are true - such as supersymmetry, the idea that every species of elementary particle has a previously-undiscovered, massive partner - ATLAS could also explain what makes up the majority of the universe's dark matter. If certain hypotheses of string theory are correct, it could even even prove the existence of extra dimensions.

Another modern cathedral in the making is the Thirty-Meter Telescope, an enormous ground-based observatory to be built in Hawaii atop the summit of Mauna Kea. Scheduled for completion in 2018, the TMT will boast unparalleled range and sensitivity, observing the cosmos in wavelengths from infrared to ultraviolet with resolution as much as twelve times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Image via.

The TMT's primary mirror, as its name suggests, will be thirty meters in diameter, giving it tremendous light-gathering capacity. (Hubble, by way of comparison, has a diameter of 2.5 meters.) But casting such a single, enormous piece of glass would be impossible - the mirror would sag under its own weight - so instead, the mirror will be made up of 492 hexagonal segments, each about a meter and a half in diameter and computer-controlled to work together as one. To compensate for the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere, the TMT will use a cutting-edge technology called adaptive optics. Nine laser emitters around the telescope will fire laser beams into the sky; sensors detect the photons that are scattered back to the telescope and compare their predicted waveforms with what's actually observed. Using that information as a reference, the telescope's computers will control thousands of mechanical actuators that reshape the mirror's surface as rapidly as eight hundred times per second, with a precision measured in nanometers, to perfectly cancel out the distortion of the atmosphere - and all this as the entire massive assembly slews across the sky to keep pace with Earth's rotation.

When complete, the TMT will be able to see the oldest and faintest starlight in the universe, back to the first stars that ignited just 400 million years after the Big Bang, and the formation of the first generation of galaxies. It will be able to directly observe Earthlike planets around nearby stars, detect supermassive black holes at cosmological distances and take direct images of their accretion disks, map the distribution of dark matter with unprecedented detail, and image the universe with greater clarity than was ever possible before.

One more example is LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, currently up and running in the United States. Like the other scientific cathedrals, it shows the tremendous effort and astounding ingenuity that human beings have poured into understanding the details of the universe we live in.

The theory of general relativity predicts that cosmic catastrophes like the collision of two neutron stars or the merger of two black holes should produce gravitational waves - fluctuations in spacetime which ripple outward from their source. The direct detection of gravitational waves would confirm one of the last and greatest predictions of Albert Einstein, and could potentially provide important information about the behavior of black holes and other massive, distant objects that are difficult or impossible to observe in the electromagnetic spectrum - since gravitational waves, unlike light rays, are not blocked by cosmic gas and dust.

Image via.

LIGO has two physically separate sites, one in Louisiana and one in Washington. Each site operates an identical detector: a laser interferometer, which consists of two tubes set up in an L shape. Each tube is two and a half miles long, is filled with an ultra-high vacuum, and contains a set of mirrors at each end. A beam splitter fires a laser beam down both arms of the L simultaneously; at the far end of each, it strikes the mirror and is reflected back to its point of origin. Under normal circumstances, the two lasers bounce back in perfect simultaneity. But the ripples of a passing gravitational wave would distort space in one direction, causing one of the laser beams to return before the other, which can be detected. If both sites register the same event simultaneously (accounting for lightspeed delay), we can be certain that it arrived from a cosmological source rather than some local event on Earth.

But even the strongest expected sources of gravitational waves, such as a merger of black holes, produce an effect that will be extremely faint by the time it reached Earth, due to the great distances involved. To account for this, LIGO needs astounding sensitivity and precision. The tube arms of the interferometer are filled with an ultra-high vacuum, evacuated to a pressure of just one-trillionth of an atmosphere, to prevent scattering of the lasers by gas molecules - one of the largest and purest vacuums ever created on Earth. (By comparison, the International Space Station orbits through atmosphere a hundred times denser.) And LIGO's mirrors are cooled to just one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero to prevent thermal noise from distorting their surfaces. With these and other innovations, LIGO's sensitivity and precision are such that it can detect a change in length as tiny as 10^-18 meters - one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. And future improvements in the works will increase its sensitivity by a factor of ten.

These great cathedrals, devoted not to worshipping imaginary deities but to understanding the cosmos we live in, give me hope for humanity's future in a way that few other endeavors do. Our world is still roiled by war, burdened by overpopulation, inflamed by religion, threatened by climate change. Yet in the midst of all the stupidity, all the greed and short-sightedness and delusion, there are places where human beings from many nations and cultures have come together to construct vast projects that are purely peaceful and devoted solely to the cause of gaining knowledge. There's no better testament to the fact that, when we choose, we can rise above our worst instincts and cooperate on something worthwhile and beautiful. Even more than any of the specific scientific findings they may produce, this is the most valuable lesson that humanity in general has to learn from these modern wonders of the world.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 8

In my review of Darwin's Black Box, I listed three ways that an irreducibly complex system can evolve:

The first can be summed up as scaffolding: extra parts which support a partially functional system until it is completely assembled, at which point the extra parts become unnecessary and are pruned away by selection. The second is the case of improvement becomes necessity, where an adaptation is at first merely beneficial, but as later changes build on it, it becomes indispensable. The third, possibly the most important, is change of function, also called cooption... A system which originally evolved to perform one function may take on a new function, starting out with multiple functioning parts rather than having to acquire them one piece at a time.

In his interview with Lee Strobel, Behe doesn't address the first two. But Strobel does ask about the third, in reference to Behe's account of the cilium:

"Maybe these three components were being used for other purposes in the cell and eventually came together for this new function... Isn't it possible that they might all come together by chance?" [p.203]

Behe's response is as follows:

"It's extraordinarily improbable," he replied. "Let me illustrate it for you. Say there are ten thousand proteins in a cell. Now, imagine you live in a town of ten thousand people, and everyone goes to the county fair at the same time. Just for fun, everyone is wearing blindfolds and is not allowed to speak. There are two other people named Lee, and your job is to link hands with them. What are the odds that you could go grab two people at random and create a link of Lees?" [p.203]

This is a clever argument, and probably seems very convincing to people who don't understand how evolution works. It can't be doubted that the odds against random chance giving rise to the right mutations to produce a cilium must be incredibly large. Has Behe put his finger on a critical flaw in evolution?

Let's say you're a poker player playing a game of five-card draw. In the initial deal, you get a full house:

9♦ 9♥ 9♣ Q♣ Q♠

The betting begins, and none of your opponents fold. The showdown comes, and one of them has two pair:

2♦ 2♥ 7♣ 7♠ K♥

One has three of a kind:

3♥ 3♦ 3♣ 8♠ 6♥

and one has a lowly ace high:

A♥ 10♦ 6♠ 4♣ 3♠

You win. Success!

At first, you bask in your victory and congratulate yourself for your good luck. But then you make a dramatic realization - the probability of getting the specific hand you were dealt was astoundingly small. After all, there are 52 cards in a standard deck! The odds of being dealt the exact hand that won you the round can be computed as just one chance in 2,598,960, or 0.0000003847693%. Given that you triumphed despite such improbability, is it really believable that your victory came about by chance? Especially if you win more than one hand, shouldn't you consider the hypothesis that there's an Intelligent Designer influencing the workings of the game?

When it's put in these terms, the fallacy is obvious. The odds of drawing one particular hand are low, but the question you should be asking is the odds of drawing any winning hand. There are many different winning hands in any particular round, and depending on what your opponents were dealt, your chances could be quite high.

This is the exact fallacy that Behe is committing. He's trying to calculate the odds of one specific set of mutations occurring to produce the cilium as it exists today. That probability, like the poker player's probability of his one exact winning hand, is fairly low. But that number is completely irrelevant, because the real question is this: what are the odds of evolution putting together any system, from any set of interactions among those ten thousand proteins, that could result in a unicellular organism gaining increased mobility? Needless to say, this number is much harder to calculate, but it's also certain to be much larger.

Behe has no excuse for not knowing this. Someone with his level of education and scientific background should be fully aware that this is how evolution works. And there's no chance that this is just a sloppy paraphrase or misquotation on Strobel's part, because Behe has used this same argument on at least two other occasions: once in his own book, and once in the paper that I alluded to in my previous post - the only peer-reviewed journal article that Behe has published in more than ten years. It appeared in 2004 in Protein Science, with the title "Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues".

The contributors on The Panda's Thumb, in a lengthy reply to this paper, point out the numerous unrealistic and restrictive assumptions that Behe makes:

...the paper says that if you have a protein function that requires two or more specific mutations in specific locations in a specific gene in a specific population, and if the function is not able to be acted on by natural selection until all mutations are in place and if the only form of mutation is point mutation, and if the population of organisms is asexual, then it will take a very large population and very long time to evolve that function. This is not unexpected.

The reply also castigates Behe for buying into the creationist myth of the "one true sequence":

The evolution of new functions is not a process that requires a certain target to be hit. There can be multiple new functions that any starting protein can acquire. Likewise, there can be multiple ways of acquiring any given function.

...the fact that [Behe and Snoke] only consider specific changes at specific locations makes their model meaningless because it assumes a fundamentally different process than the one that occurs in nature.

Ironically, as the PT post also points out, even Behe's artificially restrictive assumptions still imply that new protein functions should be easy to evolve in a relatively small population of bacteria!

By the standards of creationists who think "why are there still monkeys?" is a clever gibe, this is a far more sophisticated argument. But it's still an argument whose huge flaws should be apparent to anyone who knows even a little about evolutionary and molecular biology. Yet Michael Behe still treats it as not just valid but devastating. The only conclusions I can see fit to draw are that he's either an incredible incompetent, despite his education, or he's deliberately misleading his readers with an argument that he knows is fallacious. Which of these is more likely to be the case?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator