Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (35 of 50)

Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

NARRATOR: But Behe testified it's not just microscopic organisms that are irreducibly complex.
Evolution, he says, fails to account for the network of organs and cells that defends us from disease.
Has the theory of evolution, in particular natural selection, explained the existence of a defensive apparatus such as the immune system? No.
Do you consider it a problem?
I certainly consider it to be a problem, but other scientists who think that Darwinian evolution simply is true don't consider much of anything to be a problem with their theory.
If you could highlight the second full paragraph of Darwin's Black Box, page 138.
What you say is: 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 on the question of the origin of the immune system.
And in the context, that means that the scientific literature has no detailed testable answers to the question of how the immune system could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection.
May I approach, Your Honor? You may.
ROTHSCHILD: What I did was to pile on the witness stand articles all having very sophisticated explanations for how the immune system evolved, and basically challenged him to respond, given the claims he'd made.
Now, Dr.Behe, these articles rebut your assertion that the scientific literature has no answers on the origin of the vertebrate immune system.
No, they certainly do not.
My argument is that these articles have no detailed, rigorous explanations for how complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation in natural selection.
And these articles do not address that.
And then he starts to say, Well, have you read this book, Dr.Behe?
And he starts to pile these up on Behe's witness stand.
Eventually Behe was almost dwarfed by the stack of scientific literature on the evolutionary origin of the immune system.
All these hardworking scientists published article after article over years and years, chapters and books, full books, addressing the question of how the vertebrate immune system evolved.
But none of them are satisfactory to you.
That's a lawyer's trick.
Purely a lawyer's trick.
Now, you know, is Michael Behe going to read every one of those books before he responded?
You know, it was totally theatrics.
Mr.Rothschild, would you like your books back?
They're heavy.