Michael Behe is one of the leading proponents of Intelligent
Design and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Centre for
Science and Culture.
Discover Magazine, has published a review of Michael Behe's new
book "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of
Darwinism".
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/none-found
The Simplistic Manifesto
Michael Behe, the intellectual star behind intelligent design,
misinterprets the scienceand misses the point.
by Corey S. Powell
In May, during the first televised debate of the Republican
presidential candidates, 3 of the 10 raised their hands to indicate
that they did not believe in the theory of evolution. That
dovetails with the almost 40 percent of Americans who dont
consider the theory well supported, according to a poll by
Princeton Survey Research Associates International. In other words,
there is a huge audience deeply interested in good reasons not to
believe in Darwins ideas. Michael Behes new book, The Edge of
Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, purports to
deliver such reasons. His press release claims the book is nothing
less than intelligent designs masterworkits own On the Origin
of Species. But do Behes arguments really stand up under close
scrutiny?
The Edge of Evolution builds on ideas Behe first presented 11 years
ago in Darwins Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.
In that book he advances the idea that certain biochemical systems
are irreducibly complex, meaning that if one component is
removed, the whole thing fails. Such a system, Behe argues, could
not have evolved step by step, so it must be the result of
intentional design (presumably, but not explicitly, by a divine
creator). Behe is no hard Creationist. Previously he separated
himself from Biblical literalists by accepting the antiquity of
life and the Darwinian principles of common descent, and here he
points out that certain shared features in the DNA sequences of
chimps and humans show beyond any doubt that we and chimps share a
common ancestor.
Behes beef with mainstream evolutionary biology (and his appeal to
Darwins doubters) comes when he tries to define flaws in Darwinian
theory and to advance his own alternative. He asserts that random
mutations cant do the job of building new biochemical systems, so
most mutations that built the great structures of life must have
been nonrandom. That means they must have been designed and put in
place by an intelligent agent.
To reach this conclusion, Behe makes a number of invalid
assumptions about how molecules evolve and interact. He alleges
that, because many functional adaptations require multiple changes
in proteins, two or more mutations must occur together at the same
time in the same gene and only rarely can several mutations
sequentially add to each other to improve an organisms chances of
survival. But in fact natural selection does work on transitional
forms, as molecules and traits evolve stepwise. Stepwise evolution
has been well documented; one good instance of this is the
emergence of color vision. Mutations add up little by little,
leading to major changes to proteins over time.
Behe makes another big, related error in the way he interprets how
proteins work together. He contends that for even three proteins to
evolve in a cooperative association is wildly improbable, beyond
the edge of evolution. Within a protein, five or six amino acids
(components of proteins) need to change simultaneously for it to
bond with another protein, according to Behe. From this he
concludes that it is impossible for proteins interaction to
evolve, again requiring life to have been programmed for success
from the start. Plenty of evidence contradicts this assertion,
however. Many proteins within cells interact with other proteins in
ways in which only two or three amino acids are critical for
binding. Such simple binding sites can arise frequently in
proteins. And such interactions form the networks that regulate all
sorts of physiological processes in cells and organisms. Cell
biologists and biochemists are increasingly finding that, in truth,
protein interactions and networks are easy to evolve. Behe should
know thisbut he has a long history of alleging evolutionary
impossibilities and ignoring the scientific literature.
As unpersuasive as Behes ideas are scientifically, they are even
less convincing philosophically. Behe professes agnosticism on
whether the designer was a dope, a demon, or a deity, although he
seems peculiarly inclined toward the second possibility. His is a
strangely impoverished worldview, one that leaves little space for
awe, much less for future scientific advance; he never even raises
the obvious question of who the designer is and how it works.
Contrast this with Darwins starry-eyed summation in Origin of
Species: There is grandeur in this view of life . . . from so
simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.