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Behe and Creationist Dishonesty

A friend mentioned Michael Behe.  I wanted to respond with an example of the kind of “tricks” he plays on the audience.  It actually did not take much time to find a good example.

I searched on YouTube for a recent video.  There are many several years old.  I wanted a recent one so that I know it represents his current thinking, and not maybe some mistakes from years ago.  I am sure that the responses I am going to cite have been there for many years, but to be sure I wanted to find a very recent example to show that in spite the answers being there for many years, he continues to ignore and to not address the rather easy answers to his unanswerable questions.

This video is from June 2020 as far as I can tell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cN-aIXNQrc

The video jumps right into bacterial flagellum.  Key statements:

00:00:08: If you remove the propeller, if you remove the motor, if you remove the brackets connecting it to the cell’s membrane, the whiptail will not spin half as fast as it usually did, or  a quarter.  It’s broken, it doesn’t work at all.

I would bring your attention to this page which has been in this form since 2003: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB200_1.html

  • This page outlines a plausible 6-step course of evolution.
  • It also points out that there are bacteria that function without some of the parts he mentions

Let’s see how Behe responds, 17 years after the answer is submitted.

Just kidding.   He does not respond at all.  Instead, he draws an analogy to an outboard motor, and how if you took the propeller off, it would not push the boat.   Well, duh!   It is not an accurate analogy, but by stating it this way he is drawing on audience intuition that they can relate to, but is not relevant.  The first trick.

He implied that “incremental” would be a flagellum spinning “half as fast”.   Like, imagine we take completely finished parts, and assemble them, and this makes something slow, but evolution makes it faster.  Do you see how he is twisting his description for the purpose of his conclusion?

From there he jumps right to it being a “problem for Darwin’s theory”.  he describes that something has to “work a little bit” and then a mutation makes it “work a little better”.  Yes, you need incremental change, but the increments are not what we would intuit from our experience in the human world.  For example, a fly can go from having an antenna on its head, to having a leg in the same place, by altering how genes are triggered.   That big change is not intuitive.  We have no reason to expect evolution to be “intuitive” but this is the argument that Behe makes.  The way a body develops is like a fractal, and some incremental changes will seem like huge jumps to a human, but not really when you consider how biology works.

He then tries to explain evolution as being “building a motor starting with a crow bar” and here we run into the second trick, and that is to imply or suggest that evolution builds things in a way that humans build things.   All of the “creation demands a creator” leverages this fallacy of thinking that natural processes are just like what humans do.

You could start with just a motor, or just a propeller, but this is proposing that you would somehow magic a propeller out of think air in completed form.  That is not the way evolution works, and he should know it.   All of the parts evolve through successive forms where all of the parts are mutating.  The third trick in suggesting that the initial form of something must be exactly like the final form, and that all evolution does is to construct the animal like a human factory would.

Steven Meyer appears, and listen to what he says:  you add parts one by one.   No biologist has ever claimed that finished parts are added one by one.  This is deception.

Trick number four: Meyer says that a part that confers no function will not be passed on.   That is simply false.  If the organism survives, it will pass on ALL of the features, whether they function or not.  There are many things in biology that serve no function, but at the same time are harmless.  You might know that the human DNA, with 20,000 genes, also have 500,000 copies of a sequence that we know codes for nothing.  It is just leftover junk which is carried along because it is harmless.   Surely, these biologists must know this.

So, it is not just that Behe is wrong.   Behe is dishonest. His talks never address the points raised in Talk Origins.  Instead he keeps on, almost 20 years later, spouting the same old same old.

Behe never mentions “homology” (explained here) which is how sometimes the same structure has different functions in earlier animals, and so often evolutionary structure start serving one function, and later another.  An example is that some bones in your ear and function to aid hearing are the same bones that used to be in the jaw of reptiles.  The bone got “repurposed” and did not have to be magiced in from nothing as Behe would suggest.

Behe has to know about these issues.  The same with the irreducible complexity of the eye which he still talks about.  Complete books have been written on the topic (Academy of Science, Wikipedia, Springer) and you would think he would respond in some way, at least a response blog post.

Behe is not really intellectually honest.  He has a PhD, so we know he is smart, but he really is just a stage performer who says things that people want to hear — over and over for decades — and uses tricks that prey on human intuition and prejudices.  He has to know that biology does not work they way he says, but he continues because it pleases his audiences.  And that supports him.

I noticed he has a 2020 book where he supposedly answers his critics.  I am NOT paying $25 to find out, because if the book is like his interviews, he simply add more example that (1) seem intuitively difficult if you (2) assume biology constructs things the way humans do.  The description does not imply that he answers these points made in Talk Origins.

It may be comforting to hear someone saying what is intuitive and confirms beliefs, but wouldn’t you rather hear someone talking about what we actually know of the world?

Addendum​

I found a video promoting his new book where at about the 19 minute mark, he is asked to respond to a specific criticism that the flagellum could have evolved from another structure that is manifestly similar but performs a different function.    He says:

  • We have no evidence that one evolved from the other.  This is the “missing link” argument.  The fact that both structures exist and are so similar is evidence at the least, but simply denying it is not an argument.
  • He goes on to say that both structures are more complex than he originally thought back in 1996 — and how ironic that creationists believe that a more complex structure evolved.  (irrelevant)
  • He then — and I am not kidding — argues that evolution could have gone the other way, it could have devolved from the more complex to the less complex.  Look, if he thinks it could go one way, then it is certainly possible to go the other way.  He says this is evidence of a creator who created more complex things that then devolve.  He has no problem with the structures transitioning from one to the other, he just does not think it happened in the direction that gets more complex.

Addressing a serious critique by simply denying it is not addressing the critique.  He essentially admits it is possible, but he just doesn’t believe it and claims there is no evidence.