Chapter I

By having to carry the primary weight of the design case at Dover, Behe was going to face more scrutiny than he would have as one of a phalanx of ID stars. Critics were ready to take aim, of course, from the comic Argento (2005a) to Chapman (2007, 167-197) and Lebo (2008, 149-158), while Casey Luskin (2005d) was content to summarize Behe’s testimony in terms of the standard ID talking points, which managed to touch on none of the examples we’re about to explore.

Affable and confident to be sure, Behe’s court credibility nonetheless began to unravel at the fundamental level:

On the stand, Behe tried to establish that his book had been subjected to peer review, one of the bedrock processes of vetting the credibility of scientific writings. He testified that his book had undergone even more thorough review than a normal journal article would have because of the controversial nature of the subject. He specifically named Dr. Michael Atchison of the University of Pennsylvania as one of the book’s reviewers. But NCSE’s Matzke remembered an article written by Atchison in which he stated that he had not reviewed the book at all but had only held a ten minute phone conversation with the book’s editor over the general content. When the plaintiff’s attorney introduced this article during cross-examination, it was clearly a blow to Behe’s claim that his book had “received much more scrutiny and much more review before publication than the great majority of scientific journal articles.” Humburg & Brayton (2005b).

Interestingly, in his discussion of the “peer review” of ID in the Dover trial, John West (2005c) did not allude to this episode. As for Atchison, the veterinary professor at the University of Pennsylvania had signed on to the early DI “dissent from Darwin” list, Schaefer et al. (2002), but has not been a prominent player in the design campaign. Atchison (2000) has ventured a Christian perspective on genetic testing, for example, but (like so many on the DI dissent) he has not presented any substantive critique of Darwinism that would allow a scholarly measure to be made as to whether his divergence from Darwinism was based on a rigorous scientific evaluation of the available scientific evidence, or drawing from a much vaguer but deeper well of religious disapproval.

As Behe’s Irreducible Complexity arguments are explored more fully in Chapter 4 of Downard (2004), I will focus here on some of the broader theoretical and philosophical issues that came up, and how these related to deeper methodological concerns. Arguably the biggest one is, if one posits “design,” how many designers might there have been? Chapman (2007, 172, 175-176, 188) tracked how Behe readily acknowledge multiple designers as a theoretical possibility for ID, but that he personally believed in only a particular unitary one (his Catholic God). And yet this was the same Behe who tried on the one hand to distance ID (“a scientific theory”) from creationism (“a theological concept”) while bristling at the presumed constraints of naturalistic scientific reasoning that hunted for natural causation first and foremost.

Lebo (2008, 157) was struck by another aspect of this: backed against the wall by his own vagueness, Behe had to concede ID events appeared to be currently unobservable, and hence opening up the possibility that the original designer had up and died in the meantime. Lebo ended with Rothschild asking, “Is that what you want to teach school students, Dr. Behe?”

What more overtly theological constraint could Behe have embraced than the presumption of a single (and not extinct) designer based not on any scientific observation or inference, but solely on the grounds of his religious faith? Given his own side’s repeated insistence about how creationism differed from ID in exactly that way, if Behe wanted to operate as a fully consistent ID theorist, how could he have failed to follow up on the multiple designer concept, letting the evidence take him as far as it may, without any stifling theoretical constraint? Why saddle his own thinking with such an arbitrary limit from the start?

Unless, of course, being that consistent ID theorist would indeed open up the possibility that, if design there be, then the single designer might indeed be one of the options least likely to survive a stringent design filter—as theologically awkward a prospect as carnivorous dinosaurs living millions of years ago are to the hermeneutics of Answers in Genesis. Where evolutionists have at their disposal a vast body of interconnecting evidence (fossil sequences and the genetics and developmental biology of their varied living descendants) to argue that the design option makes less empirical sense than the evolutionary one, Behe’s own design reasoning has shown itself more than willing to uncouple vital freight cars at every turn to keep that Design Inference engine from accidentally switching off from the single designer siding (Behe pays no attention whatsoever to fossil data, for instance).

Without using methodological naturalism in some guise (such as inferring Cambrian animals were made of DNA just like the ones we see today), how many methodological tools remain in the ID kit to allow a design advocate to be so confident that the weird Cambrian arthropods were designed by the same esthetic hand as made the oh-so-different looking dinosaurs or the equally distinctive whales?

Let’s invoke one of those design analogies of the kind that Bill Dembski might have been forced to address had he not bailed out of Dover. And which is just an extrapolation of an example Rothschild did bring up in his examination of Behe: can’t we assume that a nice car in the garage means that the designer wanted to make a nice car? As opposed, say, to a clunker with bad seats and an engine that doesn’t work well. Behe refused to go any farther than saying the existence of the designed car signified that the car had been designed. How illuminating—and tautological.

My version is more about identifying systematic qualities, animal and automotive.

Cars don’t replicate naturally nor vary when they do (the twin requirements for a Darwinian system) and therefore are exclusively objects of design, in this case entirely human. But not merely human: they’re not all by the same designer. Different people working in different companies have come up with a variety of similarities and differences, all characteristic of a designer system where ideas may be copied from one product to another (like everybody eventually using steering wheels instead of tillers or featuring variable windshield wipers on their models), but still reflect the individual stylistic predilections of the varied designers.

Something else distinguishes natural undesigned systems from unnatural intelligently designed ones. Unlike a natural system where no matter how useful the biological equivalent of a variable windshield wiper may be, if you aren’t descended from a form that pioneered it, you’re out of luck. In biology some components can be nicked en bloc through horizontal gene transfer (HGT), and similar functionality can arise independently by natural convergence (such as the hydrodynamic shape of ichthyosaurs and dolphins determined by the honed utility of a smooth shape for predatory critters that have to flow through a watery environment at speed to get their dinner). But when designers copy a new feature, like General Motors and Chrysler making their product line look more like the striking Lincoln Zephyr in the late 1930s, its copying above the structural dynamic level, a form of grand imitation that renders systematic taxonomy regarding what was borrowed (related) from what far more difficult than taxonimizing naturally evolving living systems. We’ll be seeing examples of this in the discussions to come over how plausible a design argument is for living organisms.

If you only looked at the overall disparity of living forms and didn’t include all the available data regarding what goes on underneath the surface, a designer argument for them would face an obvious stylistic issue. Were Cambrian arthropods and Mesozoic dinosaurs and Cenozoic whales any less disparate than the indisputably human designs of the Big Three American car companies for model year 1959: the hyper-finned kitsch of Harley Earl’s Cadillac at General Motors, the “Forward Look” modernism of Virgil Exner’s Chrysler Imperial (with functionless independently designed fins just as big as the Caddy), and the equally controversial angle-headlamp funk of John Najjar’s humongous Lincoln Continental at Ford? True, they all have engines, transmissions, wheels, doors and seats, but the internal details of them differ in ways that would seem (at least using the naïve objections to homologies that design advocates routinely invoke to chop the Tree of Life into so much creationist baramin kindling) to support a multiple designer model as the most easily defended default.

And something else about that 1959 Lincoln. The design was a slightly tweaked installment of the 1958 model, selling poorly as the car market slid into a late Eisenhower term recession. Its marketing failure not only cost Najjar his spot as Lincoln’s design lead but almost sank the division until Ellwood Engel jumpstarted things with the sleek modernity of the smaller 1961 model (ironically, an afterthought loser in the competition to work out what the 1961 Thunderbird would look like). Engel would later redesign the 1964 Imperial to resemble his original concept when he moved over to Chrysler (aficionados of the short-lived TV series in the 1960s will know it in its armored guise as the Green Hornet’s car).

This digression on American luxury car design reminds us that designed systems have histories, they take place in time and space, and the fact that what we might dub Behe’s Black Box is so unimaginatively small on this point helps explain why design theory has had such a limited utility. To invoke design inevitably opens up the Pandora’s Box of the quality and purpose of the “design” as well as its history. To pretend as if those options are not an inevitable consequence of design reasoning, or that somehow you can avoid them by not thinking about them—as Behe has done in his work and at Dover—is a fundamental conceptual defect of the modern design movement.

On what design grounds could Behe preclude that dinosaurs went “extinct” only in the same way that the Chrysler Imperial faded out: because the manufacturer eventually stopped making them? Was the dinosaur designer—or designers (different ones for the Saurischian and Ornithischian divisions, mayhaps?)—only granted a limited run, and the Deccan Traps and Chicxulub impact were but the cancellation reminder for a team otherwise inattentive to more mundane reminders? Time to retool the factory floor for mammals, fellows. Out with the old designers and in with the new!

Now this issue of multiple versus single designers was not a topic that Behe was disposed to explore on his own. But he showed much the same dampened curiosity in the areas he did bring up.

The Expert Testimony deposition of Behe (2005a) included a mélange of exhibits gleaned from popular and scientific literature that may have illustrated more about his analytical method than he may have intended. Not unexpectedly, he included Behe (2000a; 2001c; 2004) to reiterate his views and respond to some criticism, which of course depended on the criticisms actually being invalid. But Behe included none of those criticisms for “critical analysis” comparison, though some were inadvertently covered in James Glanz (2001a) reporting on the ID controversy for The New York Times that Behe included in the Dover exhibits—possibly because his picture was so prominently on the cover?

On the methodological front, Behe sought to dissolve the issue of evolution (or ID) qualifying as a solid “theory” by trawling through PubMed for ten science papers in which “theory” is used more generally, Behe (2005a). Behe’s alternately restrictive and elastic concepts of theory at Dover caught the attention of Chapman (2007, 172-173, 180-181) and Lebo (2008, 151-155) where Behe had to let astrology slip through the slack in a way he wasn’t about to grant natural selection.

As for ID—the cherished baby who needed not to be thrown out as the water began to drain from the tub—having reduced the topic to only “Intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on the proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose,” Behe would say nothing about what those Intelligent Design mechanisms might be. Indeed, Behe agreed that Intelligent Design did not “identify who the designer is,” or “how the design occurred” or “when the design occurred.” A Triple Crown of racecourses minus any designer horses.

What was left was the old “God of the Gaps” argument (slipping the miracle in wherever things aren’t accounted for) with the cloaking device on: Behe’s resistance to any of the mechanisms of change evolutionists had to offer. Which landed at last at the Himalayan double standard Behe straddled when it came to dealing with what would constitute sufficient evidence that one of his irreducibly complex candidates would have originated by natural means after all:

Not only would I need a step-by-step, mutation-by-mutation analysis, I would also want to see relevant information such as what is the population size of the organism in which these mutations are occurring, what is the selective value of the mutation, are there any detrimental effects of the mutation, and many other such questions. Talk.Origins Archive (2006b).

Behe didn’t undertake any such investigation himself, of course, or even recommend other ID activists take a whack at it, signifying the stultifying impact of ID assumptions operating on a one-way methodological street. All the hard work has to be done by evolutionists, not design advocates. And until they have nailed down everything to Behe’s satisfaction, no need to pay attention to any of that other work, no matter how much of it there may be, or how well it may fill in vital links in the puzzle chain. It’s all or nothing for Behe.

The deadening character of this attitude for workaday incremental scientific progress was not been lost on critics of ID like John Lynch (2009a). But when Boudry et al. (2010) objected to this “absurd demand” repeated by Behe (2010c). Luskin (2011n) opined, “Apparently for these critics, Behe is ‘absurd’ for actually expecting neo-Darwinian evolution to present a convincing case.”

Luskin seems not to be able even to conceptualize that there is a double-standard issue here (a tortucan blind spot of long standing in antievolutionary apologetics, as we’ll be seeing more of in due course), where Behe is requiring a level of evidence that he is not willing to apply to his own claims. But the problem goes even deeper, to the technical forensics of whether any scientific discipline could pass muster if you never allow the foundational work to count, especially in areas where the scale or complexity of the phenomena may make it difficult to replicate in a tidy laboratory setting.

Behe’s statement put him on exactly the same methodological footing as creationists like Robert Gentry, demanding uniformitarian geology synthesize a block of granite in the lab complete with polonium halos before he would be impressed, discussed in Chapter 3 of Downard (2004). In this game of setting up arbitrarily high hurdles for their opponents, in lieu of looking at the broad body of relevant information available in the meantime, Behe and Intelligent Design are by no means the only players waiting in line to kick over the scientific lemonade stand.

Most interesting from a methodological aspect was Behe’s venture into the finer points of bacterial antibiotic resistance represented by Barry Hall (2004a). Behe was so bowled over by the Hall paper that he included a full reprint of it for the Dover court, where one could see that he had drawn a big circle around the “Not” in the title (“In Vitro Evolution Predicts that the IMP-1 Metallo-β-Lactamase Does Not Have the Potential To Evolve Increased Activity against Imipenem”) to emphasize what he took as the “limit of Darwinian evolution.” Arbitrarily deck-stacking his point further by asserting that evolutionists think “Darwinian processes can do everything,” Behe (2005a) summarized Hall’s findings thus:

This is exemplified in some recent papers from the laboratory of Professor Barry G. Hall at the University of Rochester. Although he is not an advocate of intelligent design, Professor Hall nonetheless does not automatically assume Darwinian processes can do everything. For example, he writes in a paper in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy: “Instead of assuming that metallo-β-lactamases will evolve rapidly, it would be highly desirable to accurately predict their evolution in response to carbapenem selection.” Using a method he developed, he predicts that bacteria will be unable to develop resistance to an antibiotic called imipenem. He writes in the abstract of his paper: “The results predict, with >99.9% confidence, that even under intense selection the IMP-1 β-lactamase will not evolve to confer increased resistance to imipinem.”

Behe (2005b) thought so much of this finding that he reiterated it in his rebuttal to Ken Miller, adding with bold conviction that “Barry Hall is looking to find the limits to evolution in order to help develop better antibiotics. I think this point deserves greatest emphasis. It is critical to the development of better antibiotics, pesticides and drugs to determine the limits of Darwinian evolution.” And Behe (2007b, 236-237) rolled it out once again, followed by Jonathan Sarfati (2008e) over at Answers in Genesis, freely drawing on The Edge of Evolution as authority to use Hall’s paper as a club to pound the New Scientist’s series by Michael LePage (2008a-y) on antievolutionary myths and misconceptions about evolution—an ironic maneuver on Sarfati’s part, since his secondary reliance on Behe had just added a new example of exactly the sort of defective analysis LePage was warning about, such as LePage (2008g) on “Evolution is limitlessly creative.”

So what had Hall actually done, and how was all this playing out in that world of disease abatement that Behe was so anxious to liberate from the deadening shackles of Darwinian presumption? Hall had indeed pioneered useful techniques for evaluating the potential evolution of bacterial virulence in specific cases, summarized by Hall (2004b), which should have made Behe especially mindful of all the content of the paper, and not just the bits that served his apologetic purposes. For example, this paragraph earlier in Hall’s paper:

IMP-6, which differs from IMP-1 by a single amino acid substitution, increases the MIC of meropenem 128-foldbut does not increase the resistance to imipenem. If the rapid evolution of the class A extended-spectrum β-lactamases is typical, then we should indeed be concerned about the evolution of metallo-β-lactamases in response to the clinical use of imipenem and other carbapenems. Hall (2004a, 1032).

As the mutant cousin that generates the IMP-6 enzyme appeared not to be a problem (at the moment), Hall’s experimental modeling for the more commonly generated IMP-1 suggested there wouldn’t be an impending threat from that particular direction. But the existence of an “IMP-6” ought to have clued Behe in to the existence of more one player in the bacterial game. This turns out to be rather a consistent blind spot for Behe, as seen in Chapter 4 of Downard (2004) regarding population biology issues and matters like the evolution of the vertebrate immunity system. Hall (2004a, 1033) explicitly concluded with a warning: “In order to understand the risks posed by metallo-β-lactamases, it will be necessary to conduct similar studies on representative members of each of the three metallo-β-lactamase subfamilies and to include all clinically relevant carbapenems in those studies.”

If the caricature that “Darwinian processes can do everything” is flawed, what of Behe’s implicit presumption at Dover (and since) that conditions applying to the genome of one of a broad group of related bacteria could be extrapolated into a fixed “limit of Darwinian evolution” precluding mutations in any of the many variants Hall had not studied concerning their generation of the metallo-β-lactamase (MBL) enzymes that could pose a threat to imipenem use?

It is indicative of Behe’s approach to IMP-1 (and by analogy to a lot of the argument that goes on in the ID and creationist camps on all manner of subjects) that at no time did Behe stop to explain what was going on: why mechanistically IMP-1 would be unlikely to mutate in a way to threaten the utility of imipenem, or what were the dynamics of the system that weighed even slightly in favor of a design option. Nor did Behe undertake (in his 2007 Edge of Evolution or since) any follow-up to determine what might have happened in the years since concerning that work. All he did was wave the isolated finding like a talisman to ward off the Darwinian boogieman. Following that unexplored thread suggests not only why Behe might not be the best fellow to rely on for recommendations on antibiotic policy, but provides an exemplar to remind us later on as we investigate other cases about the pitfalls of a superficial antievolutionary “scholarship” that seems utterly devoid of genuine curiosity.

IMP-1 and IMP-6 were first isolated in Japan (in 1991 and 1996 respectively), but since discovered elsewhere and encountered in various bacterial species. The IMP family poses a threat because of the way the zinc ions in its MBLs act as a catalytic cofactor to bind to the antibiotics and so disrupt their function. The reason for special concern, though, is that the genes for them have come to be attached to very active plasmids via integrons (genetic modules able to capture gene cassettes in their recombination process) as well as in “copy me” transposons, Yano et al. (2001) and Toleman et al. (2003), offering the potential for fresh mutational mixes that might not be so congenial to imipenem, such as IMP-4 showing up in several different new bacterial species in Australia and the United States, Peleg et al. (2004) and Limbago et al. (2011).