A Rhetorical Analysis Of Darwin's Black Box

Trinity College of Florida

Rhetoric of Science
Bob R. Gardner
4/7/10
While reading Darwin’s Black Box, I felt a little like cheering on the home team for a high school or college basketball team. Like going to the home town game out of a felt obligation, reading Behe’s book would not have been my first choice, but after the first quarter…er chapters I was glad I was reading it. This book sort of plays out like a basketball game, as Behe takes the time to not only support Intelligent design (Offence) but answers the critics of I.D. (Defense) in a very open way, if not always a friendly rivalry. At times I cheered on the rhetoric of I.D. and at other times I was “yelling” at the home town coach, but either way the result will be the same,
assuming the referees call the plays fairly.
Irreducible complexity Behe quotes Darwin in his book “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” - Charles Darwin.
He uses this as a springboard to his central argument that runs through Darwin’s Black Box, that is Irreducible Complexity. Behe uses the analogy of the mouse trap, a simple tool consisting of 5 simple parts to form an effective mouse killing device. We may look at a mousetrap and see it’s simplicity in design, and certainly many people have spent a lot of time “trying to build a better mousetrap” but it is always either based on that design, or going in a completely new direction, sometimes simpler, sometimes more complex, to achieve the same outcome of catching a mouse. However, you cannot simply remove one of the parts and still have an effective mousetrap, in fact, it would cease to be an mouse trap, but either a block of wood, or a jumble of metal wires. All of which may or may not be useful for another task, but never again reform the job of a mouse trap, until recombined in its proper form. There is no way for any of the parts to be removed, and there is no way for any of the parts, alone from the whole, to be formed into a working
mousetrap. So it is with life in general and cells specifically. Each cell has a job to do and each cells does its job. If a simple tool cannot be formed by accident, how could a simple cell. A screwdriver is a simple tool, and could have been made by a wonderful accident, but it still needs the screw to drive into wood, this is a two part system, that needs each other to work. Although the driver could have first been used for something else, and say a butter knife could be used to drive a screw, the screw would still need to be purposeful for its existence. A screw could have been the next step from a nail, but it would still need to be designed for the corkscrew groves to be practically in place. Like the screw, the mouse trap, may gets its final inspiration from an earlier item or trap, but to work in its present form, it must have design involved.
Rube Goldberg While reading the book and Behe’s example of a mousetrap and his analogy of the Rube Goldberg machine in his cartoons, I could not help but be transported back in my mind to my childhood, going to my grandparents house in New Hampshire for visits. They had a bookshelf in the hallway loaded with board games, everything from Chinese checkers, to Parcheesi, from spiral graph to chess, but my favorite game was Mousetrap. This game gave me hours of fun playing with my cousins, yet was complex in its deign, as you build the mousetrap in the Rube Goldberg style, elaborate piece, but outlandish piece, until one of the players mice gets caught by the sprung trap. We played this game for years, always being told to put every piece back carefully, so as not to lose any of them. One year we went to their house, and I got the game out, but a piece was missing, so the game was now useless to play, and therefore no longer any fun. Very disappointing in game play to be missing a key piece, and on the game Mousetrap, each piece was vital to the game. While my memory of this beloved childhood favorite is good for me, it serves to put a fine point in my mind to Behe’s example of the Rube Goldberg example he made. At no point can the complex system function as intended if even one piece is missing. Old Foghorn Leghorn gets away, this time. It is just another example of Irreducible Complexity that Behe brings up in his Book.
“Ten Years Later” I started out with the analogy of the home team basketball game. In keeping with that, the Epilogue chapter called Ten Years Later would be the Homecoming game, the graduates of the school coming to see the game of two bitter rivals, but in this case the players are the same, it is just the spectators that have changed and grown. I like a line Behe writes on page 256 “For modern science, ten years is like an eon.”. I like how he uses this line as well, I found it to be a striking blow to the Darwinist’s who are using the same tired playbook (keeping with my basketball analogy) ignoring the new plays the other team (I.D.) is making and scoring with. Yet instead of facing their opponents offense and defense, they are in effect bribing and bulling the referees (Media) and recruiting their new players (college students) to attack the opposing players and not look at their plays themselves. Darwinist’s are content in living the glory days of evolution when there was no I.D. movement to oppose them. They keep on spouting the same debunked data, hoping the spectators will not notice and counting on the press to ignore inconsistencies with a bias view. Despite all of this the home team I.D. is keeping on the full court press, going back to fundamentals (how cells work, and how they came to work the way they do) working as a team with honest sportsmanship. I like the first line of the closing paragraph of Behe’s “The future prospects for design are excellent, because they do not rest on any person’s or group’s preferences, but on the data.”. Simply, if I.D. continues to advance and use the data as its proof, this debate will be a slam dunk victory.