Michael Behe lecture

Intelligent design proponent Michael Behe is giving a talk in London on Monday 22nd November as part of his tour of the UK. From the ad:

200 bones. 600 muscles. Millions of nerves. Billions of cells. Trillions of organisms all working together to make one body - you. But how? An accident of evolution?

Book now for the 'Darwin or Design?' tour featuring US scientist Prof. Michael Behe and hear why he claims to have discovered evidence that life is really designed - findings that have rocked the scientific world.

The 'Darwin or Design?' national tour starts Sat 20th November. See and hear the scientific case for Intelligent Design from its leading voice - Prof Michael Behe.

Ask your questions live from the floor - engage personally with Mike Behe.

I'll be there. I would like to hear his comments on the following:


1) Behe claims that intelligent design is falsifiable, in that if someone can show how an 'irreducibly complex' system evolved in a stepwise fashion, then intelligent design would be proved incorrect. But this seems unlikely to me. If someone showed how the flagellum evolved step-by-step, Behe could simply say 'OK, the flagellum wasn't intelligently designed, but the immune system was'. In other words, he can always move around and point to another supposedly irreducibly complex system to support his argument. I think this refutes the notion that intelligent design is falsifiable.


2) If we base our knowledge of design on human design, as ID proponents do, then we must base our knowledge of intelligent designers on humans. So if ID is true, this means that intelligent designers (humans) are themselves designed by a intelligent designer. But crucially this 'earlier' intelligent designer is subject to the same criteria and so must also have been designed. This inevitably leads to an infinite regress of designers and a continual begging of the same question. I expand on this point here.


3) Behe claims that a system is irreducibly complex by the following:

By irreducible complexity I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning

The problem is that this isn't evidence of intelligent design. It is actually predicted to happen by evolutionary theory. These ‘irreducibly complex’ systems CAN evolve through step-by-step neo-Darwinian evolution. Herman Muller described the process back in 1918. For example, take a relatively complex system that performs a function. Next, gradually make that system more efficient and sophisticated by step-by-step addition of new “parts”. Then, remove some of the earlier redundant “parts” (as happens in evolution) thus increasing efficiency. You now have a more complex system than the previous one, however, if you were to artificially remove a “part” of this new system, it would cease to function. As you should be able to see, this does not mean that it couldn’t have evolved.

Here is an analogy...

Imagine a river with three stepping stones forming a rudimentary bridge. The stones constitute a system with a function. If you add a long piece of wood across all three stones it is now a slightly more complex system, still with the same function. The middle stone can now be removed without loss of function, and this newer (slightly) more complex system is more efficient in that you can walk across it rather than hopping from stone to stone. If you now remove any of the other parts of this system, ie the wood or the two outer stones, it will lose its function, and thus the bridge can be termed irreducibly complex. However, it came about in a step-by-step fashion (which includes removal of redundant parts) without loss of function.


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Edit 01/12/10

I was unable to attend the talk but PaulJ has provided a report.

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Black Magic Fail

In 2008, an Indian man called Sanal Edamaruku agreed for a famous tantra master to try and kill him with 'black magic' on live TV. The event was apparently watched by millions of people in India, many of whom live in fear of this type of black magic. Scheduled programs were dropped to allow for the live pictures to beamed across the country. As described by Edamaruku:

He boasted that he was able to kill anyone by mantra and tantra within three minutes. I grabbed my chance to put him in check and offered myself for a test. Caught on air, he couldn't escape without losing face – and his high-profile clientele. So our unprecedented experiment began.

As you can see, the tantrik tries lots of different methods and Edamaruku just stands there and laughs...





Following the failure to kill his volunteer, the tantrik suggests that he is invoking a god to protect himself. Edamaruku just laughs this suggestion off and explains that he is an atheist. The tantrik, clearly grasping at straws at this stage, claims that the black magic must be done at night, and so Edamaruku calls his bluff and offers his services again...that very night.

With no way to escape, he upped the stakes and agreed to perform the "ultimate destruction ceremony" that would kill me dead sure. With ratings soaring, the programme overran, rolling on and on in "breaking news" mode. The channel announced another round of our epic battle for the night show.

Not surprisingly, the black magic had NO effect whatsoever. Most importantly, millions of people saw that a superstition they had grown up believing to be true was actually a load of nonsense.

Part of the success of this event was the fact that the tantrik clearly believed in his abilities and so agreed to demonstrate them on live TV. Unfortunately, most practitioners of pseudoscience are less eager to directly test their claims in such a mainstream way (although a few have tried, and failed). Perhaps they know if they did so, the results would be similar to the above.

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Conservation of Information - meh!

This post is an expansion of a comment I left over at SMRT a while back. The topic was 'information' and whether or not it can be considered as a measurable quantifiable 'thing'. As stated by WEM in the OP:

There are a bunch of conservation laws (energy, momentum [angular and linear], electrical charge, etc); simply put, the value of X in a closed system will be unchanged no matter how that system changes.

It seems to me that Christian fundamentalists are trying to get "Information" added to the list. Although the devil's in the details (re. the definition of "information", whether a system is open or closed, etc), the idea is that it requires an external agent (ie. God) to introduce information to a system.

So is the total amount of information conserved? Is information an objective 'thing' that can be used by Creationists as some sort of proof for their God?


Here's my take on it...


Since different people can glean different information from the exact same source, this means that the very existence of information is subjective. It is fallacious to say that 'the information is there, you're just not seeing it', because that would leave open the possibility that there is additional information present which nobody has seen, and hence this refutes the notion that there is a quantifiable amount of information in the first place.

There could always be more information.

If two people are watching a documentary, they are taking in information. However, if one of them falls asleep before the end, the amount of information in the universe will be less than what would have existed had they both stayed awake. Thus, it is impossible to assign a tangible value to the amount of information in any system at any time, and so it is also impossible to definitively state whether it has increased or not - the amount of information might have increased for one observer but decreased for another.

The following scenario shows what I mean...

Two men watch a library and all its original contents (no other copies) burn to the ground. The first man observes a loss of information as hundreds of thousands of original books are incinerated. Most people would probably agree with this man. However, the second man, who is not interested in literature, observes an increase in information because he is an arsonist and has thus gained plenty of information from the experience. Who is to say that more information was lost than gained? What if 2 arsonists gleaned information from the fire? Would that mean that twice as much information was gained? If so, what if a billion arsonists were watching? By increasing the amount of arsonists watching, at some point in theoretical space more information would have been gained than lost. The same can be demonstrated the opposite way too, meaning information is subjective and can't be quantified or said to have definitively increased or decreased.

I'm not claiming that this example proves anything - I don't know enough about this subject and I imagine the definition of information is fuzzy at best. However, it does seem to suggest that information is not an objective thing that can be used to prove the existence of a God; eh sorry, I mean of an Intelligent Designer.

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Richard Feynman is awesome

I can't believe I've never seen this interview until now. I recommend that anyone with even a passing interest in science (mainly physics and a bit of chemistry and biology) should watch it. It's basically everything you wanted to know about in school, but they never taught.


Heat:




Fire:




Rubber bands:




Magnets:




Electricity:




Mirrors:




Trains:




Waves:




Stars:




Stars 2:




Thinking:




Thinking 2:

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Religious intolerance rife in the USA

This cannot go on. Shame on all you non-Christian Americans. I imagine the Buddhists are particularly oppressive.

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Useful links for exposing Sye TenB

I've put together some links to particular comments from Sye in which he has made inconsistent or just down right silly claims. These should prove useful to expose the absurdity of his worldview and presuppositionalist argument.


1) Sye contradicting himself and lying all in one go

Sye always says that his worldview is proven by the 'impossibility of the contrary'. I challenged him to refute my position that the Invisible Pink Hammer was actually the real omnipotent omniscient creator of the universe and could reveal things to me for certain and he replied:

"Although I do not believe that it would be possible, I have never claimed that it would be impossible, I am simply challenging you to formally debate our respective deities and revelations from same. You are unwilling to(for obvious reasons)." [Bolding mine]

I think the inconsistency between 'impossibility of the contrary' and 'I have never claimed that it would be impossible' is clear for all to see. And by stating the latter, he is simply lying. Indeed, many others have similarly requested that he refute all possible alternative worldviews, and yet he never does - he simply asserts that they are refuted.



2) Sye being a hypocrite

Sye refuses to address claims that his opponent does not actually hold, as they are just 'wasting his time'. Of course, when I proposed the Invisible Pink Hammer worldview, it was to illustrate the problem with his argument - that he cannot refute my position without also refuting his own. In this sense, I was adopting a hypothetical situation which showed the absurdity of his argument. Sye wouldn't play (for obvious reasons). But of course when he can use this type of argumentation to his advantage, Sye will use it, as he does here in a debate with another Christian.

Opponent [talking about the position that Sye does not hold]:

"Since this is an argument that anyone could easily make, you should be able to easily find me someone who has, in fact, made it. Even internet hack atheists don't make this argument."

Sye:

"I’ll make it then John, and you refute me. Here goes: “Perhaps someday there will be a naturalistic explanation as to why a body which was dead for 3 days came back to life.” There ya go John, refute me."

What a complete hypocrite. For further details on this particular incident, see here.



3) Another example of Sye lying

Over at Dawson's blog, Sye's website got an 'absolute' trouncing (pun intended). You'd think Sye would go through Dawson's criticisms and point out all the errors, but alas it seems that he didn't have the time:

Sye TenB said...
Maybe someday I'll have the time to read all that.

Perhaps a debate is in order sometime. What say?

AUGUST 27, 2010 9:17 PM

When Dawson responded and asked him to reconsider, Sye replied:

"Erm, cause I don't have the time to take right now...I will be away all week, and simply do not have the time to sift through such a long post. It's not like I haven't heard these criticisms before, or that you have not heard the resolutions, so I don't feel a pressing need to answer them. As I said, perhaps when I have the time I will get to this."

So he didn't read the post, or even have time to 'sift through' it, and yet he knows exactly what all the criticisms are?

Another lie.

Sye does try to squirm out of this by claiming that although he stated that he didn't have time to read it - "Erm, I skimmed it. Same ka ka, just more words."

So, he didn't have time to 'sift through' it, but he did have time to 'skim' it...!!?? Right. This smells of something. It smells real bad.

4) Sye admitting that an omnipotent omniscient being could, if it so desired, fool him into thinking he is certain

Sye's whole worldview relies on his claim that God can reveal things to him for certain. The trouble is by admitting the above possibility, he has also admitted that it is possible he is being fooled into simply 'thinking' he is certain. Here are the relevant quotes:

I asked:

”As for my claim that an omniscient omnipotent being fooled you into thinking you are certain. You have yet to confirm or deny that this is a possibility. You really want to deny it is possible but you know you can't because this would be denying what an omnipotent being can do, a position you yourself claim is absurd.“

Sye replied:

"Not at all, I do not address it because it is IRRELEVANT. OF COURSE an omnipotent omniscient being could do this, and He could also reveal in such a way that we can be certain that HE has not! (Quote mine away)." [Bolding mine]

The fact that an omnipotent omniscient being could do this automatically negates any claims to certainty as delivered by said being. Because of this admission, Sye can never know whether certainty is being revealed or not.



5) Sye admitting that his interpretation of the bible is not infallible

Everything Sye knows about God comes directly from scripture. So his claims of certainty are derived directly from bible passages. And yet here he admits that his interpretation of the bible is not infallible:

" Reply by SyeTenB on August 16, 2010 at 4:04pm
...I have never said, nor do I claim that my interpretation is infallible, it is merely my claim that God can make us certain about some things, like the fact that He exists. I have never claimed that my interpretation of Romans 1 is infallible, but your argument against it is making me want to :-)"

Surely to be absolutely certain of anything, your interpretation of it must be infallible. In short, since Sye's interpretation of the bible is not infallible, his whole argument could be wrong, since it comes directly from the bible.



6) Sye admitting that he doesn't know how God reveals certainty

In order to know for certain that certainty is being revealed, Sye must know exactly how this is happening. Otherwise, it is simply impossible to know it with certainty. Here Sye admits that he doesn't know, and even if God told him, he wouldn't understand the explanation:

by SyeTenB » Sat Aug 22, 2009 12:40 am
"No, I would not call it an ‘illusory feat.’ I am more of the position that even if God did explain it to me, I would not be able to understand it."

This admission reduces his absolute-100%-logically-certain-proof-style of argumentation to mere faith. He doesn't understand how God reveals certainty, so he has to take it on faith that he does.



7) Sye making inconsistent claims

Sye likes to claim that a non-believer's position is inconsistent with their wordlview. Here is an example of Sye being inconsistent.

Sye said to Paul Baird:

You still don't get it Paul. I do not claim that the argument fails, you do. Problem is without an absolute standard of logic NO ARGUMENT CAN FAIL, and your claim is refuted.

But later he changed his mind to say:

The claim may or may not be true, but your attempt at justifying knowledge of its truth is refuted since you cannot account for truth.

So in one comment he asserts that his opponent's claim is refuted, and in another he says that it might be true. And he expects us to take his position seriously?



Please let me know if I've missed any of Sye's other stupid and/or inconsistent statements and I'll add them to this thread...

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TAM London Day 2

After a night on the beer, Day 2 of TAM London started off with a lot of water and coffee...

The first talk of the day was by Marcus Chown, who gave a talk on the "Top 10 Bonkers Things About The Universe" (much of which is covered here). For instance, all the matter that makes up the human race is actually only the size of a sugar cube - by virtue of the fact that the majority of an atom is empty space. Also, time isn't constant as it is influenced by gravity. The closer you are to a strong gravitational force (i.e. large mass), the slower time actually goes, meaning someone at the top of a staircase is ageing faster than someone at the bottom. Oh and he ended with a space montage to the sound of Ziggy Stardust. Nice.

DJ Grothe then gave probably the only talk of the weekend that was solely about skepticism. He issued a bit of a rallying call and encouraged everyone to be more active, in setting up skeptical blogs, sceptical meetings and so on. So I'll dedicate this post to you DJ. Happy? :-D

Today's panel discussion was hosted by Rebecca Watson and was on "Technology and New Media". The panelists were Gia Milinovich, Kate Russell, Neil Denny and Martin Robbins (who live blogged the whole conference). They spoke about blogs, podcasts, twitter as well as 'old media' and the vast differences between them.

Melinda Gebbie was the next speaker and she was interviewed by Rebecca Watson about her new book, Lost Girls, which is basically a pornographic story made from the point of view of women. She wrote the book to fill a niche that she explains exists because almost all pornography is currently made from a man's perspective. As one of the questioners said, basically porn with a plot then. This segment didn't seem to have much to do with skepticism though, as one blogger points out here.

The last talk before lunch was one I was really looking forward too. Unfortunately, Stephen Fry couldn't make it and the consolation was a pre-recorded interview with him and Tim Minchin. It wasn't bad, but to be honest, Minchin (understandably) isn't much of an interviewer (it was more of a two-way conversation really) and whoever edited the footage needs to be sacked. So I was a bit disappointed but it was interesting to hear his opinion on skepticism and his mastery of the language was evident on several occasions.

LUNCH!!

Graham Linehan was interviewed by Jon Ronson straight after lunch, an encounter that was always likely to be entertaining. Although the subject matter of Twitter did provide for some interesting discussion (and several very funny videos), I was hoping to hear a bit more about Linehan's experiences writing Father Ted, Black Books, etc. Down with this sort of thing...

The next speaker was guaranteed to get a good reception. PZ Myers talks about tone and how "we shouldn't gratuitously obnoxious, we should be purposefully obnoxious." His talk was good but the highlight was the Q and A session. The organisers gave him a bit longer than other speakers as it was obvious a lot of people would want to ask questions. And PZ is in his element when he has to think on his feet. His answers were always engaging, concise and appropriate. Oh and did I mention that I met him. Just in case here's the pic again...

COFFEE!!

The last talk of the weekend went to Alan Moore, creator of comic book franchises such as Watchmen and V for Vendetta. I have to be honest, I was struggling as this stage, the previous night was really catching up with me. Moore proceeded to recite a poem about the town where he grew up that seemed to go on for at least 20-25 minutes. Not the best end to the weekend in my opinion (then again, I'm not a comic book fan).

And that was it! Randi closed the conference and everyone said their goodbyes. All in all, it was an Amazing experience and I would recommended it to anyone who is interested in skeptical thinking and general science. Or if you just want to have 3 nights on the beer in a row.

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