Re: Another victory for science!

In article <240sq15h7gnfjclhrrkt2m9jst5hm3ruh3@xxxxxxx>,
damifino@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>
> ID should not be taught in science class. It is not a scientific
> theory.
>
> Behe has authored other publications.
>
> http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/behe.html
> publications since 1990


BTW, Behe is not a classic supporter of ID anyway and makes classic
mistakes regarding evolution. Below is interesting reading:


Darwin's Black Box (The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution)
by Michael J. Behe
Reviewed by Kenneth R. Miller
(as published in Creation / Evolution Volume 16: pp, 36-40 [1996])

Perhaps the single most stunning thing about Darwin's Black Box, Michael
Behe's "Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," is the amount of territory
that
its author concedes to Darwinism. As tempted as they might be to pick up
this book in their own defense, "scientific creationists" should think
twice
about enlisting an ally who has concluded that the Earth is several
billion
years old, that evolutionary biology has had "much success in accounting
for
the patterns of life we see around us 1," that evolution accounts for
the
appearance of new organisms including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and
who
is convinced that all organisms share a "common ancestor." In plain
language, this means that Michael Behe and I share an evolutionary view
of
the natural history of the Earth and the meaning of the fossil record;
namely, that present-day organisms have been produced by a process of
descent with modification from their ancient ancestors. Behe is clear,
firm,
and consistent on this point. For example, when Michael and I engaged in
debate at the 1995 meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, I
argued
that the 100% match of DNA sequences in the pseudogene region of
beta-globin
was proof that humans and gorillas shared a recent common ancestor. To
my
surprise, Behe said that he shared that view, and had no problem with
the
notion of common ancestry. Creationists who believe that Behe is on
their
side should proceed with caution - he states very clearly that evolution
can
produce new species, and that human beings are one of those species.

Michael Behe is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh
University,
and not surprisingly, biochemistry, his own discipline, is at the heart
of
his argument. Simply stated, he claims that Darwinism, whatever it may
explain at the organismic level, fails to account for the evolution of
the
complex biochemical machinery that is found in every living cell. He
writes:
"for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for
the
molecular structure of life. It is the purpose of this book to show that
it
does not." 2

Behe engages in some rhetorical heavy-lifting to support this
contention. In
the first half of his book the reader is treated to a lively description
of
some of the most intricate of life's microscopic machinery - the cilia
and
flagella that produce cell movement, the cascade of blood-clotting
proteins,
the systems that target proteins to specific sites within the cell, the
production of antibodies by the immune system, and the intricacies of
biosynthetic pathways. Behe's descriptions of these systems are a
delight to
read. He is an excellent writer, and describes the complexities of the
cell
with the flair of a gifted teacher.

Why does the existence of these (and many other) systems rule out
evolution?
Because they are "irreducibly complex," meaning that if they are missing
just one of their many parts, they cannot function. Behe writes that
"Irreducibly complex systems ... cannot evolve in a Darwinian fashion."
3
Why not? Because natural selection works on small mutations in just one
component at a time. If dozens or even hundreds of distinct proteins,
precisely fashioned, are required to make a functional cilium, how could
natural selection slowly and patiently craft them, one at a time, while
waiting for the complex function of ciliary movement to emerge? It
couldn't,
so, according to Behe, the hypothesis that the cilium was produced by
evolution is therefore disproved. If evolution did not make the cilium,
then
"intelligent design" must have. He writes: "life on earth at its most
fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of
intelligent activity." 4

If all of this has a familiar ring, it should. It is the classic
"Argument
from Design," articulated so well by William Paley nearly 200 years ago
in
his book Natural Theology. Behe is candid in his admiration for Paley,
and
although he takes care to point out some of Paley's mistakes, he leaves
no
doubt that he views the Argument from Design as his principal logical
weapon
against Darwinism. To Behe, the intricacy and complexity of natural
systems
at the biochemical level shows evidence of intelligent design.

At its core, Behe's argument is about the mechanism of evolution, which
distinguishes him from "young-earth creationists" who deny the validity
of
the geological ages, the appearance of new species, and attempt to prove
that the fossil record is either an illusion or a vast conspiracy. Behe
will
have none of this, and explicitly denies any connection with
"creationism."
5 Nonetheless, he recognizes that his ideas do have theological
implications
as well as scientific ones. He is not at all modest about these
implications, comparing the discovery of design to achievements of
"Newton
and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur and Darwin." 6 And he
believes that he knows why the scientific community has not embraced
intelligent design to explain cellular complexity: "Why is the
observation
of design handled with intellectual gloves? The dilemma is that while
one
side of the elephant is labeled intelligent design, the other side might
be
labeled God." 7 So, according to Behe, design is rejected by the
scientific
community for the most non-scientific of reasons - its theological
significance.

Behe has gone two centuries into the past to find the argument from
design,
dusted it off, and invigorated it with the modern language of
biochemistry.
But there are problems in this excursion. Not the least of these is the
fact
that the argument from design has been answered, not once, but many
times by
writers such as Dawkins, Gould, and even Darwin himself. The multiple
parts
of complex, interlocking biological systems do not evolve as individual
parts, despite Behe's claim that they must. They evolve together, as
systems
that are gradually expanded, enlarged, and adapted to new purposes. As
Richard Dawkins successfully argued in The Blind Watchmaker, natural
selection can act on these evolving systems at every step of their
transformation.

As factual examples we could choose any of the systems whose evolution
is
documented by the fossil record, a source apparently acceptable to Behe.
The
three smallest bones in the human body, the malleus, incus, and stapes,
carry sound vibrations across the middle ear, from the membrane-like
tympanum (the eardrum) to the oval window. This five component system
fits
Behe's test of irreducible complexity perfectly - if any one of its
parts
are taken away or modified, hearing would be lost. This is the kind of
system that evolution supposedly cannot produce. Unfortunately for
"intelligent design," the fossil record elegantly and precisely
documents
exactly how this system formed. During the evolution of mammals, bones
that
originally formed the rear portion of the reptilian lower jaw were
gradually
pushed backwards and reduced in size until they migrated into the middle
ear, forming the bony connections that carry vibrations into the inner
ears
of present-day mammals. A system of perfectly-formed, interlocking
components, specified by multiple genes, was gradually refashioned and
adapted for another purpose altogether - something that this book claims
to
be impossible. As the well-informed reader may know, creationist critics
of
this interpretation of fossils in the reptile to mammal transition once
charged that this could not have taken place. What would happen, they
joked,
to the unfortunate reptile while he was waiting for two of his jaw bones
to
migrate into the middle ear? The poor creature could neither hear nor
eat!
As students of evolution may know, A. W. Crompton of Harvard University
brought this laughter to a deafening halt when he unearthed a fossil
with a
double articulation of the jaw joint - an adaptation that would allow
the
animal to both eat and hear during the transition, enabling natural
selection to favor each of the intermediate stages.

Is there something special about biochemistry that prevents evolution
from
doing exactly the same thing to a microscopic system composed of
proteins?
Absolutely not. But evolution does make a testable prediction with
respect
to such systems. That prediction is that the degree of similarity in DNA
sequences of organisms should correspond to their evolutionary
histories.
And, as the author is all too well aware, that prediction has been borne
out
a thousand times over.

Despite the close correspondence of gene sequence to fossil sequence,
Behe
demands that evolutionary biologists should tell us exactly "how"
evolution
can produce a complex biochemical system. This is a good strategic
choice on
his part, because the systems he cites, being common to most eukaryotic
cells, are literally hundreds of millions of years old. And, being
biochemical, they leave no fossils. Once burned, twice shy, Behe may be
hoping to avoid the fate of his 1994 claim that there were no
transitional
fossils linking the first fossil whales with their land-dwelling
Mesonychid
ancestors 8. Less than a year after that prediction, the existence of
not
one, not two, but three transitional species between whales and
land-dwelling eocine Mesonychids was confirmed. Nonetheless, it is quite
possible to rise to the occasion and answer his challenge in biochemical
terms. In fact, Russell Doolittle, whose investigations on the evolution
of
blood clotting are discussed in this text, has done exactly this. Behe
is at
great pains to disqualify this work, even though Doolittle has not only
shown how such a complex system might evolve, but has also produced
comparative studies showing how it probably did evolve.

In dismissing Doolittle's work, and in preempting any attempt to show
how
evolution might produce a complex biochemical system, Behe scoffs at the
notion that a biochemical system adapted for one purpose might be
adapted by
evolution for a totally different function, despite physiological
examples
to the contrary in the fossil record. He dismisses, for example, the
notion
that the parts of a cilium, including proteins like dynein and tubulin,
could have evolved by gene duplication even though similar forms of
dynein
and tubulin are used for other purposes in the cell. Most cell
biologists
will be unconvinced by his explanations of why the cilium could not have
been assembled from proteins originally used for other purposes -
especially
since the cilium itself has been adapted for another purpose in one of
the
very tissues that Behe uses as an example of design - the vertebrate
photoreceptor cell.

As the book draws to a conclusion, Behe attempts to develop the idea of
intelligent design into a testable, scientific hypothesis. This is a
lofty
goal, but this is also where his argument collapses. Scientific ideas
must
be formulated in terms that make them testable. Indeed, Darwin himself
proposed several ways in which his theory might be tested and disproved.
And
one of these ways - the contention that organisms contain biochemical
parts
that could not have been produced by Darwinian means - is the basis of
Behe's criticisms of evolution. Being a trained experimental scientist,
one
would have expected that Behe would have seen the need to do likewise.
Unfortunately, he did not.

Let's suppose, for example, that a fellow scientist were to take Behe's
challenge to evolution seriously, and attempted to show how a specific
biochemical system composed of multiple parts could have evolved. A
hypothesis for design, formulated in genuinely scientific terms, must be
disprovable, and this is exactly the kind of evidence that might
disprove
it. Incredibly, Behe has intentionally insulated "intelligent design"
from
this and any other scientific test. How has he done this? In the
penultimate
chapter of his text, he lists some of the driving forces associated with
evolutionary change, including natural selection, genetic drift, founder
effects, gene flow, meiotic drive, and transposition 9. Behe states that
all
of these agents can effect change in biological systems, and admits that
they may account completely for at least some of the biochemical
features of
a living cell. So, if our colleague were to show how these forces could
have
produced, say, the bacterial flagellum, would he be entitled to say: "I
have
disproved design?" Not at all, according to Behe. "The production of
some
biological improvements by mutation and natural selection - by evolution
-
is quite compatible with intelligent design theory." 10 In other words,
any
evidence for the evolution of complexity is dismissed in advance as
being
irrelevant to the problem of design. "Design" exists only when and where
evolution cannot explain it!

This sterile definition of design means that Behe is free to ignore any
conceivable evidence for the evolution of any biochemical system. Such
an
idea, intentionally placed outside the realm of testability, is not
science,
whatever the pretentions of its advocates.

If Behe's formulation of intelligent design as science is illogical, his
mechanism for how the work of the designer was inserted into living
systems
is almost laughable. Remember that Behe accepts the validity of the
geological ages and the fossil record - an open-minded scientist can
hardly
do otherwise - and yet he claims that the complex biochemical systems he
extols were fashioned by an intelligent agent. When did this agent go to
work, and when were the genes encoding them engineered? He has an answer
ready:

"Suppose that nearly four billion years ago the designer made the
first
cell, already containing all of the irreducibly complex biochemical
systems
discussed here and many others. (One can postulate that the designs for
systems that were to be used later, such as blood clotting, were present
but
not "turned on." In present-day organisms plenty of genes are turned off
for
a while, sometimes for generations, to be turned on at a later time.)" 11

This means that billions of years ago a humble prokaryote was packed
with
genes that would be turned off for hundreds of millions of years before
they
produced the eukaryotic cilium, and genes for blood clotting proteins
that
would pass more than a billion inactive years in genetic "cold storage."
And
what happens during those billions of years? As any student of genetics
will
tell you, because those genes are not expressed, natural selection
cannot
weed out genetic mistakes. This means that mutations will accumulate in
these genes at breathtaking rates, rendering then hopelessly changed and
inoperative hundreds of millions of years before Behe says that they
will be
needed.

Contrary to Behe's claims, the evidence of evolution in the fossil
record is
not irrelevant to his argument. It has forced him, for the sake of
consistency, to cobble his acceptance of the earth's well-documented
natural
history together with the doctrine of intelligent design. The result is
an
absolutely hopeless genetic fantasy of "pre-formed" genes waiting for
the
organisms that might need them to gradually appear. This absurdity is
the
unavoidable result of trying to make "design" conform to that
troublesome
fossil record. The very same fossil record that provides the primary
evidence for evolution.

However serious its scientific flaws, this interesting and colorful book
is
sure to attract attention. Michael Behe would like us to believe that he
has
discovered a new biological principle. But the real news in Darwin's
Black
Box is that a contemporary scientist has dipped back into the past and
wrapped the remains of the Argument from Design in a shiny cloth of
biochemistry. In this new clothing, the old idea may surprise a few
unsuspecting readers who have not thought long or seriously about the
mechanisms of evolution. They may be entertained by Behe's energy, and
sustained by his enthusiasm. But ultimately, the careful reader will
recognize this book for what it truly is - an argument against evolution
that concedes nearly all the contested ground to Darwin's edifice, and
then
ends up teetering on little more than rhetoric and personal skepticism



Kenneth R. Miller
Professor of Biology
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
Review of Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box
by Kenneth R. Miller

Darwin's Black Box (The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution)
by Michael J. Behe
Reviewed by Kenneth R. Miller
(as published in Creation / Evolution Volume 16: pp, 36-40 [1996])

Perhaps the single most stunning thing about Darwin's Black Box, Michael
Behe's "Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," is the amount of territory
that
its author concedes to Darwinism. As tempted as they might be to pick up
this book in their own defense, "scientific creationists" should think
twice
about enlisting an ally who has concluded that the Earth is several
billion
years old, that evolutionary biology has had "much success in accounting
for
the patterns of life we see around us 1," that evolution accounts for
the
appearance of new organisms including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and
who
is convinced that all organisms share a "common ancestor." In plain
language, this means that Michael Behe and I share an evolutionary view
of
the natural history of the Earth and the meaning of the fossil record;
namely, that present-day organisms have been produced by a process of
descent with modification from their ancient ancestors. Behe is clear,
firm,
and consistent on this point. For example, when Michael and I engaged in
debate at the 1995 meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, I
argued
that the 100% match of DNA sequences in the pseudogene region of
beta-globin
was proof that humans and gorillas shared a recent common ancestor. To
my
surprise, Behe said that he shared that view, and had no problem with
the
notion of common ancestry. Creationists who believe that Behe is on
their
side should proceed with caution - he states very clearly that evolution
can
produce new species, and that human beings are one of those species.

Michael Behe is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh
University,
and not surprisingly, biochemistry, his own discipline, is at the heart
of
his argument. Simply stated, he claims that Darwinism, whatever it may
explain at the organismic level, fails to account for the evolution of
the
complex biochemical machinery that is found in every living cell. He
writes:
"for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for
the
molecular structure of life. It is the purpose of this book to show that
it
does not." 2

Behe engages in some rhetorical heavy-lifting to support this
contention. In
the first half of his book the reader is treated to a lively description
of
some of the most intricate of life's microscopic machinery - the cilia
and
flagella that produce cell movement, the cascade of blood-clotting
proteins,
the systems that target proteins to specific sites within the cell, the
production of antibodies by the immune system, and the intricacies of
biosynthetic pathways. Behe's descriptions of these systems are a
delight to
read. He is an excellent writer, and describes the complexities of the
cell
with the flair of a gifted teacher.

Why does the existence of these (and many other) systems rule out
evolution?
Because they are "irreducibly complex," meaning that if they are missing
just one of their many parts, they cannot function. Behe writes that
"Irreducibly complex systems ... cannot evolve in a Darwinian fashion."
3
Why not? Because natural selection works on small mutations in just one
component at a time. If dozens or even hundreds of distinct proteins,
precisely fashioned, are required to make a functional cilium, how could
natural selection slowly and patiently craft them, one at a time, while
waiting for the complex function of ciliary movement to emerge? It
couldn't,
so, according to Behe, the hypothesis that the cilium was produced by
evolution is therefore disproved. If evolution did not make the cilium,
then
"intelligent design" must have. He writes: "life on earth at its most
fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of
intelligent activity." 4

If all of this has a familiar ring, it should. It is the classic
"Argument
from Design," articulated so well by William Paley nearly 200 years ago
in
his book Natural Theology. Behe is candid in his admiration for Paley,
and
although he takes care to point out some of Paley's mistakes, he leaves
no
doubt that he views the Argument from Design as his principal logical
weapon
against Darwinism. To Behe, the intricacy and complexity of natural
systems
at the biochemical level shows evidence of intelligent design.

At its core, Behe's argument is about the mechanism of evolution, which
distinguishes him from "young-earth creationists" who deny the validity
of
the geological ages, the appearance of new species, and attempt to prove
that the fossil record is either an illusion or a vast conspiracy. Behe
will
have none of this, and explicitly denies any connection with
"creationism."
5 Nonetheless, he recognizes that his ideas do have theological
implications
as well as scientific ones. He is not at all modest about these
implications, comparing the discovery of design to achievements of
"Newton
and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur and Darwin." 6 And he
believes that he knows why the scientific community has not embraced
intelligent design to explain cellular complexity: "Why is the
observation
of design handled with intellectual gloves? The dilemma is that while
one
side of the elephant is labeled intelligent design, the other side might
be
labeled God." 7 So, according to Behe, design is rejected by the
scientific
community for the most non-scientific of reasons - its theological
significance.

Behe has gone two centuries into the past to find the argument from
design,
dusted it off, and invigorated it with the modern language of
biochemistry.
But there are problems in this excursion. Not the least of these is the
fact
that the argument from design has been answered, not once, but many
times by
writers such as Dawkins, Gould, and even Darwin himself. The multiple
parts
of complex, interlocking biological systems do not evolve as individual
parts, despite Behe's claim that they must. They evolve together, as
systems
that are gradually expanded, enlarged, and adapted to new purposes. As
Richard Dawkins successfully argued in The Blind Watchmaker, natural
selection can act on these evolving systems at every step of their
transformation.

As factual examples we could choose any of the systems whose evolution
is
documented by the fossil record, a source apparently acceptable to Behe.
The
three smallest bones in the human body, the malleus, incus, and stapes,
carry sound vibrations across the middle ear, from the membrane-like
tympanum (the eardrum) to the oval window. This five component system
fits
Behe's test of irreducible complexity perfectly - if any one of its
parts
are taken away or modified, hearing would be lost. This is the kind of
system that evolution supposedly cannot produce. Unfortunately for
"intelligent design," the fossil record elegantly and precisely
documents
exactly how this system formed. During the evolution of mammals, bones
that
originally formed the rear portion of the reptilian lower jaw were
gradually
pushed backwards and reduced in size until they migrated into the middle
ear, forming the bony connections that carry vibrations into the inner
ears
of present-day mammals. A system of perfectly-formed, interlocking
components, specified by multiple genes, was gradually refashioned and
adapted for another purpose altogether - something that this book claims
to
be impossible. As the well-informed reader may know, creationist critics
of
this interpretation of fossils in the reptile to mammal transition once
charged that this could not have taken place. What would happen, they
joked,
to the unfortunate reptile while he was waiting for two of his jaw bones
to
migrate into the middle ear? The poor creature could neither hear nor
eat!
As students of evolution may know, A. W. Crompton of Harvard University
brought this laughter to a deafening halt when he unearthed a fossil
with a
double articulation of the jaw joint - an adaptation that would allow
the
animal to both eat and hear during the transition, enabling natural
selection to favor each of the intermediate stages.

Is there something special about biochemistry that prevents evolution
from
doing exactly the same thing to a microscopic system composed of
proteins?
Absolutely not. But evolution does make a testable prediction with
respect
to such systems. That prediction is that the degree of similarity in DNA
sequences of organisms should correspond to their evolutionary
histories.
And, as the author is all too well aware, that prediction has been borne
out
a thousand times over.

Despite the close correspondence of gene sequence to fossil sequence,
Behe
demands that evolutionary biologists should tell us exactly "how"
evolution
can produce a complex biochemical system. This is a good strategic
choice on
his part, because the systems he cites, being common to most eukaryotic
cells, are literally hundreds of millions of years old. And, being
biochemical, they leave no fossils. Once burned, twice shy, Behe may be
hoping to avoid the fate of his 1994 claim that there were no
transitional
fossils linking the first fossil whales with their land-dwelling
Mesonychid
ancestors 8. Less than a year after that prediction, the existence of
not
one, not two, but three transitional species between whales and
land-dwelling eocine Mesonychids was confirmed. Nonetheless, it is quite
possible to rise to the occasion and answer his challenge in biochemical
terms. In fact, Russell Doolittle, whose investigations on the evolution
of
blood clotting are discussed in this text, has done exactly this. Behe
is at
great pains to disqualify this work, even though Doolittle has not only
shown how such a complex system might evolve, but has also produced
comparative studies showing how it probably did evolve.

In dismissing Doolittle's work, and in preempting any attempt to show
how
evolution might produce a complex biochemical system, Behe scoffs at the
notion that a biochemical system adapted for one purpose might be
adapted by
evolution for a totally different function, despite physiological
examples
to the contrary in the fossil record. He dismisses, for example, the
notion
that the parts of a cilium, including proteins like dynein and tubulin,
could have evolved by gene duplication even though similar forms of
dynein
and tubulin are used for other purposes in the cell. Most cell
biologists
will be unconvinced by his explanations of why the cilium could not have
been assembled from proteins originally used for other purposes -
especially
since the cilium itself has been adapted for another purpose in one of
the
very tissues that Behe uses as an example of design - the vertebrate
photoreceptor cell.

As the book draws to a conclusion, Behe attempts to develop the idea of
intelligent design into a testable, scientific hypothesis. This is a
lofty
goal, but this is also where his argument collapses. Scientific ideas
must
be formulated in terms that make them testable. Indeed, Darwin himself
proposed several ways in which his theory might be tested and disproved.
And
one of these ways - the contention that organisms contain biochemical
parts
that could not have been produced by Darwinian means - is the basis of
Behe's criticisms of evolution. Being a trained experimental scientist,
one
would have expected that Behe would have seen the need to do likewise.
Unfortunately, he did not.

Let's suppose, for example, that a fellow scientist were to take Behe's
challenge to evolution seriously, and attempted to show how a specific
biochemical system composed of multiple parts could have evolved. A
hypothesis for design, formulated in genuinely scientific terms, must be
disprovable, and this is exactly the kind of evidence that might
disprove
it. Incredibly, Behe has intentionally insulated "intelligent design"
from
this and any other scientific test. How has he done this? In the
penultimate
chapter of his text, he lists some of the driving forces associated with
evolutionary change, including natural selection, genetic drift, founder
effects, gene flow, meiotic drive, and transposition 9. Behe states that
all
of these agents can effect change in biological systems, and admits that
they may account completely for at least some of the biochemical
features of
a living cell. So, if our colleague were to show how these forces could
have
produced, say, the bacterial flagellum, would he be entitled to say: "I
have
disproved design?" Not at all, according to Behe. "The production of
some
biological improvements by mutation and natural selection - by evolution
-
is quite compatible with intelligent design theory." 10 In other words,
any
evidence for the evolution of complexity is dismissed in advance as
being
irrelevant to the problem of design. "Design" exists only when and where
evolution cannot explain it!

This sterile definition of design means that Behe is free to ignore any
conceivable evidence for the evolution of any biochemical system. Such
an
idea, intentionally placed outside the realm of testability, is not
science,
whatever the pretentions of its advocates.

If Behe's formulation of intelligent design as science is illogical, his
mechanism for how the work of the designer was inserted into living
systems
is almost laughable. Remember that Behe accepts the validity of the
geological ages and the fossil record - an open-minded scientist can
hardly
do otherwise - and yet he claims that the complex biochemical systems he
extols were fashioned by an intelligent agent. When did this agent go to
work, and when were the genes encoding them engineered? He has an answer
ready:

"Suppose that nearly four billion years ago the designer made the
first
cell, already containing all of the irreducibly complex biochemical
systems
discussed here and many others. (One can postulate that the designs for
systems that were to be used later, such as blood clotting, were present
but
not "turned on." In present-day organisms plenty of genes are turned off
for
a while, sometimes for generations, to be turned on at a later time.)" 11

This means that billions of years ago a humble prokaryote was packed
with
genes that would be turned off for hundreds of millions of years before
they
produced the eukaryotic cilium, and genes for blood clotting proteins
that
would pass more than a billion inactive years in genetic "cold storage."
And
what happens during those billions of years? As any student of genetics
will
tell you, because those genes are not expressed, natural selection
cannot
weed out genetic mistakes. This means that mutations will accumulate in
these genes at breathtaking rates, rendering then hopelessly changed and
inoperative hundreds of millions of years before Behe says that they
will be
needed.

Contrary to Behe's claims, the evidence of evolution in the fossil
record is
not irrelevant to his argument. It has forced him, for the sake of
consistency, to cobble his acceptance of the earth's well-documented
natural
history together with the doctrine of intelligent design. The result is
an
absolutely hopeless genetic fantasy of "pre-formed" genes waiting for
the
organisms that might need them to gradually appear. This absurdity is
the
unavoidable result of trying to make "design" conform to that
troublesome
fossil record. The very same fossil record that provides the primary
evidence for evolution.

However serious its scientific flaws, this interesting and colorful book
is
sure to attract attention. Michael Behe would like us to believe that he
has
discovered a new biological principle. But the real news in Darwin's
Black
Box is that a contemporary scientist has dipped back into the past and
wrapped the remains of the Argument from Design in a shiny cloth of
biochemistry. In this new clothing, the old idea may surprise a few
unsuspecting readers who have not thought long or seriously about the
mechanisms of evolution. They may be entertained by Behe's energy, and
sustained by his enthusiasm. But ultimately, the careful reader will
recognize this book for what it truly is - an argument against evolution
that concedes nearly all the contested ground to Darwin's edifice, and
then
ends up teetering on little more than rhetoric and personal skepticism


Kenneth R. Miller
Professor of Biology
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912

--
Will Brink @ http://www.brinkzone.com/


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Has Dembski located the orange book(s)?
    ... 1st edition drawing that made it into an English publication and was ... example by Michael Behe, who cites it repeatedly in Darwin's Black Box. ... Biochemistry textbook explains *a lot* about Michael Behe's worldview. ... the very qualities needed to understand biochemical evolution. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: A somewhat belated review of Darwins Black Box
    ... > and he's always taunted me as being closed minded for not reading Behe. ... > probably the smartest person in the Intelligent Design movement. ... > from self-professed creationists in the sense that he accepts evolution ... > But if the readers don't already get biochemistry, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • A somewhat belated review of Darwins Black Box
    ... and he's always taunted me as being closed minded for not reading Behe. ... probably the smartest person in the Intelligent Design movement. ... from self-professed creationists in the sense that he accepts evolution ... But if the readers don't already get biochemistry, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: A somewhat belated review of Darwins Black Box
    ... > and he's always taunted me as being closed minded for not reading Behe. ... > probably the smartest person in the Intelligent Design movement. ... > from self-professed creationists in the sense that he accepts evolution ... > But if the readers don't already get biochemistry, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Behe in the latest Protein Science
    ... IDers, and Behe, do not deny microevolution. ... "microevolution" and plain old regular evolution, ... > that biological systems exhibit irreducible complexity. ... I am not saying that an improbability argument is inherently ...
    (talk.origins)