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A Response to Paul Laddis In his article, “The Dogmatists' New Clothes” (Stanford Review , 5/13/05), Paul Laddis makes a number of glaring errors. In his effort to bash intelligent design (ID) as a “pseudoscience,” he overlooks a great deal of scientific evidence and commits several logical fallacies. First, he describes ID as creationism “dressed up as science.” This common and ridiculous allegation is made time and time again by defenders of neo-Darwinism. The fact is that creationism is proudly rooted in the Book of Genesis, whether creationists themselves believe in an old earth (billions of years) or a young earth (thousands of years). ID makes no claim about the age of the earth or the identity of the designer and does not rely on the Genesis account to guide research. Second, Laddis oversimplifies the argument for ID, reducing it to: 1) “Everyone agrees that living things appear designed”; 2) “There are ‘structural obstacles' to the evolution of biological systems”; and 3) “Therefore, the best explanation is that these systems were in fact designed by an intelligent being.” ID is more rigorous than that. This framework neglects to mention that an inference to design may be made if the system in question exhibits complex specified information (i.e., if it fits a highly improbable pattern). Linking this to biology, certain biological systems exhibit complexity (the thirty or so proteins that comprise the bacterial flagellum) and specification (all the proteins are required in a specific arrangement in order for the flagellum to function). Thus, because this irreducibly complex system exhibits specified complexity, an inference to design may be made. This is quite different from saying that ID is the best inference simply because obstacles exist to evolutionary explanations. Third, Laddis alleges “Behe presented as his sole example a bacterial flagellum.” This is downright false. Speaking at the Veritas Forum, Behe argued that the blood-clotting cascade exhibits irreducible complexity. Elsewhere, ID theorists have argued that ATP synthase, protein transport, cilia, and other systems are also examples of irreducibly complex systems. Fourth, Laddis contends that the type III secretory system (TTSS) is a “prominent example” of a functional precursor to the flagellum that could have been co-opted for use in a flagellum. Bacteria use the TTSS to pass toxins into other cells and thus spread disease, such as the bubonic plague. The challenge the TTSS supposedly poses to ID is that the ten proteins comprising it are present in the bacterial flagellum, which suggests to Darwinists that a step-by-step sequence of functional intermediates eventually evolving into the flagellum exists. There are several problems with this argument, however. Research done at UCSD has indicated the TTSS likely evolved from the flagellum, not the other way around, leaving an open question the origin of the flagellum—assuming such evolution even occurred.[1] In a speech to the American Museum of Natural History, ID theorist William Dembski pointed out that just-so stories like the TTSS argument “do nothing to establish whether the end evolved in a Darwinian fashion from the beginning unless the probability of each step in the series can be quantified, the probability at each step turns out to be reasonably large, and each step constitutes an advantage to the organism (in particular, viability of the whole organism must at all times be preserved).”[2] Darwinists who advance this explanation fail on all three counts. As ID theorists Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer pointed out during their presentation at the Second International Conference on Design & Nature in Greece, the overwhelming majority of the flagellum's proteins are “unique to the motor and are not found in any other living system.”[3] They also argued that “the parts would need to be assembled in the correct temporal sequence similar to the way an automobile is assembled in factory,” which requires “many other protein machines to time the expression of those assembly instructions.” The case for co-option, then, “tacitly presupposes the need for the very thing it seeks to explain—a functionally interdependent system of proteins.” Fifth, the claim that protein structure and function “often changes gradually” through point mutations is ludicrous. There is no evidence to support this statement. Even mutations to allegedly neutral amino acids can render a protein non-functional. How enough point mutations could accumulate to change the function of a protein is unclear. Sixth, Laddis' assertion to the contrary, gene duplication is not “quite common” and there exists no tendency for duplicated genes “to diverge into specialized forms.” A study in 2000 by scientists at the University of Oregon found that “the fate awaiting most gene duplicates appears to be silencing rather than preservation.”[4] As Casey Luskin of the IDEA Center has written, the study also determined that the “average gene only duplicates only once every 100 million years.”[5] Gene duplication shouldn't be considered a goldmine of evolutionary raw material. Seventh, Laddis declares that since Behe “has not put forward any model of the ‘designer,' his ‘theory' makes no predictions, only ad hoc suppositions.” This is a classic non sequitur. How does it logically follow that because the identity of the designer is unknown the theory makes no predictions? On the contrary, ID makes quite a few predictions, including, for example, that allegedly functionless “junk” DNA does, indeed, have a function. The existence of more irreducibly complex systems, a lack of precursors to the Cambrian phyla, a strong resistance in proteins to evolution, and functions for organs and systems thought to be “vestigial” and functionless are further predictions that ID can make. One recent hypothesis articulated by ID theorists Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzales and recently reviewed in Nature is the idea of a “privileged planet,” one finely-tuned both for life and scientific discovery. Lastly, Laddis concludes with a lamentation: “I wish the organizers [of the Veritas Forum] had chosen speakers who know where belief ends and scientific fact begins.” Presumably, Laddis would've liked to hear from some Darwinian scientists whose theories wouldn't have as clearly religious implications. But this ignores the fact that many Darwinists are driven by agnostic impulses and that Darwinism lends support to atheism, which many prominent Darwinists have embraced over the years. No one would argue, however, that Darwinists should be barred from speaking at universities because science and their beliefs are complementary. Whether Paul Laddis wants to admit it or not, intelligent design proponents have a solid grasp of the scientific evidence. They have done and are doing real scientific research on real scientific predictions and real scientific problems. To dismiss an entire community of hundreds of scientists on a basis that has just been demonstrated to be fatally flawed is to bury one's head in the sand, to shut out scientific dissent, and, to be quite honest, just encourage us. [1] Saier, Milton H., Jr. Evolution of bacterial type III protein secretion systems. TRENDS in Microbiology . 12(3):113-115. 2004 [2] Dembski, William A. “Does Evolution Even Have a Mechanism?” Address to the American Museum of Natural History. 23 April 2002. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1154 [3] Minnich, Scott A., and Meyer, Stephen C. Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III Regulatory Circuits in Pathogenetic Bacteria. Presented at the Second International Conference on Design & Nature in Rhodes , Greece . 1 September 2004. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2181 [4] Lynch, Michael, and Conery, John S. The Evolutionary Fate and Consequence of Duplicate Genes. Science 290:1151-1155. 2000. [5] Casey, Luskin. “Evolution and the Problem of Non-Functional Intermediates.” http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/841 Copyright 2005 idurc.org. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
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