Richard Dawkins v. Michael Behe

July 5, 2007 by Dr. Mc.

Richard Dawkins’ July 1 attack on Michael Behe amazes me in its strength of accusation and weakness of argument. I will begin by acknowledging that Dawkins is a highly acclaimed professor at Oxford, and I am not, but I do not find that an excuse not to make clear his smoke screen. The article begins by slamming Behe’s legitimacy, not his arguments. Behe is referred to as someone to “feel sorry for,” a “creationist” who is “adrift from the world of real science.” I am always suspicious when an argument begins with an attack on character, and my suspicions are further justified later when Dawkins suggests that Behe’s “creationist fans” would be appalled to know that he accepts the concept of common decent (all organisms had a common ancestor). First you say he is a creationist; then you point out that he does not hold creationist views. Make up your mind, Dr. Dawkins. Are you saying he is a creationist or that he is not? Or does it depend on the point you want to make?

After slamming Behe’s legitimacy and concluding that he has no friends, Dawkins gets around to evidence.. sort’a. He says that Behe’s irreducible complexity argument “remains as unconvincing as when Darwin himself anticipated it.” The suggestion of this statement is that Darwin thought of Behe’s argument 150 years ago and dismissed it as overturned by evidence. That is not exactly what happened. As a matter of fact, Behe directly quotes Darwin from Origin of the Species on page 39 of his book: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would completely break down.” Like any honest scientist, Darwin stated (anticipated) what would falsify his theory, and clearly does so. The reason Behe quotes Darwin is that any discovery of irreducible complexity does exactly that. Dawkins says that Kenneth Miller “beautifully showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.” What Dr. Miller actually showed was that the first ten parts of the flagellum are functional when assembled. He makes it sound is if the less parts that work, the more the whole is demystified. Just the opposite is true. He then states that all other parts are functional separately. What he did not demonstrate was that each of the 50 steps of the assemblage could be justified separately as useful–that the addition of each molecule was functional for the organism and therefore supportable by natural selection.

Dawkins finds it “bizarre” that Behe would focus on random mutation as the key to Darwin’s theory. Dawkins next statement I find bizarre: “unacquainted with genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for all Darwin knew.” Think about what Dawkins is saying: He says Darwin did not understand mutations, though they are required for his theory, but might have credited their cause to what the organism eats. This statement is not a reflection on Behe, as the positioning in the paragraph might suggest. It is a slam on Darwin’s understanding of his own theory, and a suggestion that mutation by digestion might be an acceptable explanation for Dawkins. Mutations ARE random, and no one, especially atheists such as Dawkins, believes anything else. What Dawkins cares to call key instead of random mutation is natural selection, a concept which no one denies, ever since Henry Blyth first explained it to Charles Darwin. (Blyth, by the way, was a creationist, who saw the variations has having limits that required a special creation for broader kinds.)

Dawkins argues that Behe’s objection of randomness as insufficient to explain all life is unjustified. Perhaps Dawkins should review papers from the 1966 symposium of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, where the mathematical challenge to random origin of life was set by one scholar at 1 chance in 10^1,000. There has never been a successful mathematical rebuttal to this challenge.

Then Dawkins used domestic dog breeding to justify his claim that natural selection is all that is needed to prove evolution. This is no advancement of thought, because it is the same argument that Darwin himself used. In the first place, breeding is not natural, but directed by intelligence. In the second place, it is not primarily the manipulation of mutations but of pre-existing genes. Characteristics that are preferred are bread, while those that are not are eliminated. Perhaps there is a mutation, such as the birth of a hairless dog, but there has never been a demonstration that a mutation has increased information. And natural or artificial selection only eliminate alternatives, they do not create them. Elimination is not creative. Let me state that another way: Elimination is not creative. You cannot get anything you want by eliminating what you don’t want. Mutation MUST furnish new alternatives, or evolution cannot work. I find it hard to believe that Dawkins does not understand that. But I must doubt either his thinking or his motives. Here I will stop.

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