And yet, @Jon_Garvey… Behe tries to make Devolution a “thing” … when what he should be doing is publicly and Frequently dis-avowing all Young Earth theories as untenable.
How do we square his frequent and ongoing mingling with Young Earth Creationists when he seems to have gone on the record as adopting a PRO-Biologos position? a little more than a decade ago! [see his two quotes at the bottom of this post].
If we are to take his quotes seriously, he shouldn’t be attacking the theoretical underpinnings of Harvard’s demonstration of white bacteria on black growth media… he shouldn’t be spending his time defending Young Earth Creationist agendas.
What is going on with this fellow?
[Behe quotes from an online article in 2006!] "Behe has made his views clear that he believes in an ancient earth and even accepts common descent. Consider what Behe said in an online letter-to-the-editor with the journal Science just a few years ago: “[Eugenie] Scott refers to me as an intelligent design “creationist,” even though I clearly write in my book “Darwin’s Black Box” (which Scott cites) that I am not a creationist and have no reason to doubt common descent. In fact, my own views fit quite comfortably with the 40% of scientists that Scott acknowledges think evolution occurred, but was guided by God.” (Intelligent Design Is Not Creationism by Michael Behe)
"And consider what Behe said in Darwin’s Black Box: “As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.” (Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pg 5)"
Further on the two quotes on Behe included in a 2006 online article:
BioLogos was established in 2007. I find it more than passingly odd that Behe’s quotes, sounding very much like BioLogos promotional literature, are no longer offered by Behe - - since the creation of BioLogos itself !
If Behe is essentially an Old Earth-kind-of-guy, who endorses an earth of Billions of Years, and who thus presumably believes that millions of species on the Earth have been produced through evolutionary processes applied to Common Descent - -
why would he spend so much time defending the interests of Young Earth agendas?
I think it strikes to the heart of his credibility … and seriously impairs his ability to find Christian allies who are most decidedly oppose any scenarios making the Earth around 5,000 years old !
In the first place, I don’t find it helpful to dictate to other peoprle what their agenda “ought” to be, regarding Young Earth Creationism or anything else: otherwise we’d all be open to being told we should be saving the lost or feeding the poor rather than spouting off here.
Secondly, I can’t see why what you call “devolution” should be considered a Young Earth distinctive.
Thirdly the point that Behe makes is simply that, in most of the cases of empirically verified “laboratory” evolution, adaptation has occurred by the loss of old functions, rather than the gain of new ones. This would be the case for chloroquine resistance, for Lenski’s E coli citrate tolerance, and for antibiotic resistance. His point is that at some time that functional capital must be exhausted if the abundance of sophisticated functions of biology - and especially in speciation - is to be explained.
Of course, he’d fully aware that adaptive evolution could do away with brains if it helped survival, but it’s not not “Creationist” to question how the fittest arrive - that was still under discussion at the Royal Society symposium, as I understand it.
Behe is a theistic evolutionist. It isn’t that complicated. He really is.
I halfway agree with @Eddie…Behe is not defending YEC science in any way. He is not convinced by young earth creationism.
However, and this is something I admire about him, he does often defend YECs as decent people who are often victimized in the dialogue. I think one of his big motivators is that he feels people like Dawkins are abusive to ordinary church folk (and who can deny this?) that are YECs for religions reason. In his view, his work is an act of defending powerless members of the Church from a powerful and abusive system.
Though I disagree with his strategy, both on substance and because it is not effective, I really admire his motivations. i think that most have stand to learn much from it. He has a correct view of the Church, and he is not ashamed to associate with YECs. He sees this as his primary community, crazy uncles and all. Would that were true of all of us.
Yes, YEC is despised and scorned within science. That is the way our world works. The Church is different. It is inclusive. We need to treat each other as family. We cannot call God “father”, reject a “brother or sister”, and some how thing we are living consistent with the Gospel reality of the Family of God. To do so is to delude ourselves and injure the Church.
So yes, Behe does defend YEC interests (even though disagrees with their science) just as we all should do.
[quote=“Jon_Garvey, post:124, topic:9418”]
The first thing I note is that his opponents are interacting with his work directly, rather than drawing conclusions from reports about it. And they’re also willing to interact with him directly.[/quote]
And I note that Behe is NOT interacting nor citing the malaria work directly, he’s still quote-mining the sentence from the twelve-year-old White review because the data from the actual work don’t support his conclusion.
Does Behe’s avoidance of the actual work bother you too, Jon?
[quote=“Jon_Garvey, post:128, topic:9418”]
Thirdly the point that Behe makes is simply that, in most of the cases of empirically verified “laboratory” evolution, adaptation has occurred by the loss of old functions, rather than the gain of new ones.[/quote]
But is that true for most of the cases?
[quote]This would be the case for chloroquine resistance, for Lenski’s E coli citrate tolerance, and for antibiotic resistance.
[/quote]So are you implicitly claiming that there are no more than five cases of “empirically verified evolution”?
He doesn’t spend any time doing malaria research, either, despite the fact that he portrays those in the field as not understanding the evolution of resistance to antimalarials.
There are a lot of lives that Behe could save if he’s right…
Correcting misapprehensions about someone’s opinion when they’re not here to respond to the pack is, in my view, simple charity. It doesn’t commit me to agreeing with him or arguing on his behalf.
Or does it just annoy you if I don’t join in the character assasination?
Craig Story, professor of biology at Gordon College and member of the ASA, has written a very helpful article on how the immune system uses a stochastic process along with a selection process to generate antibodies.
I think I’ll spend more time with your mystification than Eddie’s. I could say I like buttered toast, and he could easily expound on why my statement is confusing.
So, Jon, this is a quick list of my “impressions” that I have in my mind about Behe:
All the quotes by Behe (that I personally know about) which are interpreted as endorsements of “Common Descent” and Earth being billions of years old came in - - or before - - BioLogos was established in 2007. Do you know of any written or spoken comments by him since that time that renew these positions?
One reporter says that Behe is a Catholic. It wasn’t mentioned whether he was an enthusiastic Catholic, or merely raised in a Catholic family. But I was surprised when he recently started discussing “De-Evolution” (in connection with the Harvard team’s work on filming Bacterial evolution).
If Behe does, in fact, enthusiastically support Evolution with Common Descent, as well as the extreme antiquity of the Earth, how is it that he is considered so alien from the BioLogos “umbrella”. Let’s face it, just from those who post on BioLogos boards, we can see there are ALL SORTS of new and exotic mixtures of God’s Will, Choice, and Modes of Operation … some of them being quite a bit more extreme than Behe’s views are. You do understand that, right? If you need me to itemize some of the exotic scenario/forms we find here by pro-BioLogos folks, I’ll be happy to do it.
. . . . But Behe seems to me an Old Fuddy Duddy compared to some of the ladies and gentlemen here.
I know that Behe has been criticized now and then by some members of the YEC community … but frankly, it seems like they are generally and happily holding back in their assessment of Behe. Would you agree that this is true?
I’ll post some more when I see what some of these ideas trigger in the way of discussion.
I always love to read your thought-provoking posts. However, I do not think it helpful to try to establish a small group of “camps” in the origins discussion, and try to classify people according to their loyalty to a particular camp.
Well, goodness, you are certainly parsimonious in what you think is helpful. Please don’t let the word that rhymes with “harmonious” give you the impression that I think your approach is very helpful either.
Behe is either a perfectly sound example of the many camps within BioLogos … or he isn’t. So, really, I’m more interested in seeing the whole community of Christian Evolutionists as just TWO groups - - and I don’t mean “Intelligent Design” vs. “Evolutionary Christians”.
My two “Umbrellas” would be more effectively characterized as:
“Christians who support Evolution, over millions of years, by Common Descent, along with various estimates regarding the frequency of God’s “special handling” of this Evolution”
Versus:
“All the other Christians who don’t think the Earth is Billions/Millions of years old, and so don’t care about
Common Descent either.”
How’s that, Chris, for throwing the doors wide open? Now it seems to me, Behe is either well situated in the former group … and would be delightful company on these boards … or he isn’t. As we can see here with the general tone of discussion regarding Behe, there are a good number of eccentrics here who think Behe is quite wrong … as they are surrounded by any number of other eccentrics who are happily situated within the BioLogs ranks.
I can get specific if anyone insists that I be specific. But as I said before, Behe seems like a downright Fuddy Duddy compared to some of the explanations I’ve read from my co-Logos contributors.
Thank you Chris. Warm advent wishes to you too from northern california Thank you for the paper it is great support to the pubmed paper Dennis sent me.
The above paragraph is supporting my argument that the search part of the process is not entirely stochastic. It is limiting the amount of the genome it must search through which is critical to reducing search time to a workable level. The difference between this mechanism and the neo darwinian mechanism is that the search is particially directed and narrows the search space.
Thank you for the paper it is great support to the pubmed paper Dennis sent me.