Added insert(....10-8-06)
I just read BarryA's description here of Rule 803(18) which he says applies directly to this situation and demonstrates Judge Jones incompetence in his reliance upon this stunt.
Appenix A of the booklet is Behe’s response to the judgement which contains this little rather funny snippet:
(11) In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.” (23:19 (Behe)).
Several points:
1) Although the opinion’s phrasing makes it seem to come from my mouth, the remark about the studies being “not good enough” was the cross-examining attorney’s, not mine.
2) I was given no chance to read them, and at the time considered the dumping of a stack of papers and books on the witness stand to be just a stunt, simply bad courtroom theater. Yet the Court treats it seriously.
3) The Court here speaks of “evidence for evolution”. Throughout the trial I carefully distinguished between the various meanings of the word “evolution”, and I made it abundantly clear that I was challenging Darwin’s proposed mechanism of random mutation coupled to natural selection. Unfortunately, the Court here, as in many other places in its opinion, ignores the distinction between evolution and Darwinism. I said in my testimony that the studies may have been fine as far as they went, but that they certainly did not present detailed, rigorous explanations for the evolution of the immune system by random mutation and natural selection — if they had, that knowledge would be reflected in more recent studies that I had had a chance to read (see below).
4) This is the most blatant example of the Court’s simply accepting the Plaintiffs’ say-so on the state of the science and disregarding the opinions of the defendants’ experts. I strongly suspect the Court did not itself read the “fifty eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system” and determine from its own expertise that they demonstrated Darwinian claims. How can the Court declare that a stack of publications shows anything at all if the defense expert disputes it and the Court has not itself read and understood them?
In my own direct testimony I went through the papers referenced by Professor Miller in his testimony and showed they didn’t even contain the phrase “random mutation”; that is, they assumed Darwinian evolution by random mutation and natural selection was true — they did not even try to demonstrate it. I further showed in particular that several very recent immunology papers cited by Miller were highly speculative, in other words, that there is no current rigorous Darwinian explanation for the immune system. The Court does not mention this testimony.
16 comments:
"If there are 50 articles and a number of books on his speciality, he should have read them out of professional objectivity. How can he continue practice at the sharp end of his science if he does not read the literature?"
The problem is that Behe's ID work is largely seperate from his professional work as a Biochemist, making the literature in question (and much of his testimony) outside his speciality.
However that's the defense's problem, not the plaintiffs'. If they put up an 'expert witness,' it is their reponsibility to ensure that this witness is sufficiently knowledgable to withstand cross-examination on the areas in which they are testifying. Behe could reasonably have expected to have been cross-examined on any of his examples of Irreducible Complexity, so should have made sure that he was well-prepared to discuss research efforts on the evolution on any of them.
This sort of intellectual laziness seems to be fairly typical of Behe. He has done little since Darwin's Black Box came out, and seems content to do the minimum to keep himself on the creationist lecture circuit.
If you even want to begin a serious defense of Behe/IC/ID on the immune system point, you have to defend Behe's 1996 statement:
"We can look high or we can look low, in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system." (Darwin's Black Box, p. 138)
And you have to read this:
Supplementary Material for: Bottaro, Andrea, Inlay, Matt A., and Matzke, Nicholas J. (2006). "Immunology in the spotlight at the Dover 'Intelligent Design' trial." Nature Immunology. 7(5), 433-435. May 2005.
http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/exhibits/immune/index.html
Allygally & Anon,
Miller says that the stack of papers proves his view of the state of research regarding the origin of the immune system.
Behe says that that stack of papers proves his view of the state of research regarding the origin of the immune system.
Did Judge Jones read the pile before coming to the conclusion that Miller was right and Behe was wrong? How exactly did Judge Jones come to the conclusion that Miller was correct?
Allygally,
Dumping a huge pile of papers, chapters and books in a courtroom is just silly behaviour and for Miller to do it and for Judge Jones to take it seriously does neither of them credit.
As Behe pointed out no-one can read everything so we rely on good review articles to keep us up to date with a wider spectrum of science. Behe claims that he was up to date with the most recent reviews on the evolution of the immune system and that if anything had changed dramatically since DBB then he would have been alerted to it by this mechanism.
"Behe says that that stack of papers proves his view of the state of research regarding the origin of the immune system."
No he did not! He said that he hadn't read the stack. Therefore he cannot know what the stack proves.
Hrafn,
OK if you prefer....Behe is saying that the little stack in court is just a part of a larger stack which proves his view of the state of research about the origin of the immune system.
What was he supposed to do? Read them in the courtroom and provide a running commentary?
"Dumping a huge pile of papers, chapters and books in a courtroom is just silly behaviour and for Miller to do it and for Judge Jones to take it seriously does neither of them credit."
Firstly, it wasn't Miller who did this, it was Rothschild.
Secondly, how else was Rothschild to confront Behe with the existence of literature on the evolution of the immune system, whose existence Behe denied?
Confronting Behe with this pile of literature was directly relevant to impeaching Behe's testimony of its non-existence!
If Behe didn't want to be made to look an idiot on the stand, he should have done his homework more thoroughly before making such sweeping statements.
"Behe is saying that the little stack in court is just a part of a larger stack which proves his view of the state of research about the origin of the immune system."
Your claim is false as a matter of pure logic.
Behe claimed that there was no literature on the evolution of the immune system. Rothschild presented him with counter-examples, refuting his claims. No "larger stack" can as a matter of pure logic refute these counter-examples. The counter-examples exist, therefore Behe's claim is false.
"What was he supposed to do? Read them in the courtroom and provide a running commentary?"
1) In presenting himself as an expert witness on the subject, he obliged himself to be aware of the literature on the subject, so should have had at least a general idea as to the contents of the pile.
2) If he wanted to familiarise himself with it further, he should have requested a recess in order to skim them to see exactly what issues they were covering, and then presented arguments why they didn't provide adequate explanations of the evolution of the immune system.
Throughout his cross-examination, Behe proved himself to be an ill-prepared and incompetent expert witness.It was Rothschild's job to highlight this as much as possible, and you can hardly blame him for doing his job well.
Hrafn,
"Behe claimed that there was no literature on the evolution of the immune system."
Where exactly did Behe make such a ridiculous statement?
"Where exactly did Behe make such a ridiculous statement?"
He made it in Darwin's Black Box:
"We can look high or we can look low in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system."
The lack of an evolutionary explanation of the immune system, and other such examples, lies at the heart of Behe's claims of Irreducible Complexity. Therefore, if he wished to give credible testimony on IC, he had to make sure that he was fully aware of evolutionary research into them.
Allygally: This may have been responded to lower down - but if a pile of stuff is dumped on a table, how can you tell even whether you have read any of it? He wasn't given time to review them THERE. And had the court read them? Did the court know that they were evidence in support of the plaintiff's claim?
Paul & Allygally,
I was interested to see that this issue is also being discussed over at Uncommon Descent and I put the added note in at the top to this effect.
I think that some useful points have come out of this over there....maybe I should start a new thread...
The Uncommon Descent posting seems to be a piece of 'Monday Morning Quarterbacking' of highly doubtful legitimacy. We have no way of knowing whether BarryA's objections would have been upheld by a judge, let alone whether they would have had any real impact (or merely slowed down proceedings while the plaintiffs' attorney dotted his 'i's and crossed his 't's).
Regardless, the defense did not make these objections, Behe's testimony was entered into evidence, and Jones was perfectly reasonable in including this evidence in the basis of his ruling. This is how an adverserial court system works.
Judge Jones is not to blame for any shortcomings in Behe's knowledge, or for shortcomings in the defense generally.
As a working scientist, I have to concur with other commenters that Behe's lack of knowledge of the literature in the field is very problematic. While I would not expect him to be intimately acquainted with all those papers, but when he is making a blanket statement that there is no publication which describes the evolution of any complex system (a claim he has consistently made, and is in the afterword of the latest reprint of DBB), he should have some minimal familiarity with the field. 50 papers is not much, it’s about the standard size of a reference list for most journals. I am junior co-author of a massive review on neuropeptides, and I had to keep track of a large number of papers on neuropeptides and their role in the immune system (many more than got into the actual review). I certainly can't cite chapter and verse from these papers now, but I know the key papers, the most recent papers and the key arguments used in these papers.
Behe, claiming there is no evidence, should have a keen understanding of the literature; these papers should not have surprised him. Especially as the RAG transposase hypothesis is the major theory for the evolution of the adaptive immune system. Especially since it has made several testable predictions, which have indeed been tested and confirmed (and has even been published in Scientific American, something that Behe said was required o take a theory seriously).
Behe's claim that there were "zero" references to random mutation is wrong, and disingenuous at the best, as in the trial he admitted the papers talked about specific types of random mutation (transposition). As well, the random mutation aspect is so well known that it often doesn't need to be explicitly addressed, you can read through many papers on mutations and antibiotic resistance, where they don't discuss the "random" nature at all, because it has been so well established previously. As for natural selection, it is extensively discussed (although using technical language Behe's simple word search won't pick up, see for example Gould, S. J., Hildreth, J. E. and Booth, A. M. (2004). "The evolution of alloimmunity and the genesis of adaptive immunity." Quarterly Review of Biology 79(4): 359-382 which deals with natural selection extensively).
Behe's claim that he pointed out that later articles were speculative is also disingenuous. Apart from the fact that there were many established papers with solid experiential evidence that he ignored, these "speculative" articles were making specific testable hypotheses, not hand waving. See the massive bibliography of the evolution of the immune system and its introduction. And follow the link to the annotated bibliography to see exactly how much information we have on the immune system, and how badly Behe misunderstands it.
I have since noticed that BarryA has posted multiple threads on this issue. The one I was responding to above was his 'After Further Review, It Was Not Judge Jones Only.'
The one Andrew was referring to was his 'In Defense of the Defendants’ Lawyers in the Dover Case.' However I do not think that BarryA's interpretation of Rule 803(18) is necessarily either correct or even relevant (in that it wasn't specific statements within the publications that was of issue, so much as their very existence).
In this post Wesley Elsberry rather thoroughly shreads BarryA's abuse of Rule 803(18).
I should note that I seldom find Uncommon Descent to be well informed, and the opinions and antics of its denizens tend to be clownish in the extreme.
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