Michael Behe: how I came to disagree with most contemporary scientists

 But first a necessary digression to explain how I came to disagree with most contemporary scientists on this pivotal subject. Imagine my surprise a while back when I opened an academic journal called Biology & Philosophy and spotted this sentence: “To see the point quite palpably, note that Stalin, or Osama bin Laden, or Michael Behe, or your favorite villain is also . . .”7 The man who included me in that rogues gallery was Alexander Rosenberg, R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University—a fellow I’ve never met. His article had precious little to do with me. The line was an offhand remark in the course of arguing that the well-known philosopher Daniel Dennett—a founding member of the New Atheists—was something of a wimp, because in his books he didn’t clearly spell out the utter nihilism that Rosenberg saw as a consequence of Darwin’s theory.

It was a silly remark but, unfortunately, it does accurately reflect the hostility felt by a large chunk of academia toward those of us who publicly argue the case for purpose in nature. (Notice that the overt insult was passed along by the reviewers of the article and the journal editor.) We might see ourselves as just trying to puzzle out those existential questions that kept us awake at night as kids. But folks such as Rosenberg seem to envision peasants with torches and pitchforks marching on their faculty offices. We might just be wondering what the evidence of nature really shows. But “since nihilism is true,”8 too many academics think there’s nothing to think about; therefore contrary views must be dishonest. So before we begin the book I want to try to head off such charges of bad faith. To show that I come by my views honestly, let me very briefly recount the history of my own thinking.

I was born into a large Roman Catholic family and, like all of my brothers and sisters, attended Catholic grade school and high school. Unlike some Christian denominations, the Catholic Church never had much of a problem with evolution. I remember being taught about it in seventh grade by Sister David Marie. The important point, she stressed, is that God created the universe, life, and humanity. How he did that, whether quickly or slowly, employing natural law or not, was up to him, not us, and our best evidence these days shows that evolution is correct. That view was perfectly fine with me. In fact, although I wasn’t aware of it then, it had been the predominant understanding in Catholic circles for a long time. For example, the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia has a lengthy scholarly article on evolution that makes a number of crucial distinctions, including a distinction “between the [basic] theory of evolution and Darwinism.”9 Plain “evolution” was no big theological deal. But framing it as necessarily nihilistic, as Alexander Rosenberg and many others do, was tantamount to denying Christianity. Even as a boy I had plenty of reasons to believe in God that had nothing to do with evolution.

When I went off to Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University), I decided to major in chemistry, specifically because I wanted to know how the world worked; I wanted to know what made things tick. Since everything is made of chemicals, then chemistry seemed to be the obvious choice. During my college years I had a summer “co-op” job in a biochemistry lab at the Department of Agriculture research facilities near Philadelphia, where I became fascinated with the chemistry of life. Senior year at Drexel I took a course on evolutionary biochemistry to learn how it all came together.

During graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, I had no qualms about standard evolutionary theory and would occasionally (and smugly) tease friends who did. I remember one day at the NIH chewing over the Big Questions with a fellow Catholic postdoc, Joanne (her brother was a priest), who was in the same lab I was. Talk turned to the origin of life. Although she and I were both happy to think life started by natural laws, we kept bumping up against problems. I pointed out that to get the first cell, you’d first need a membrane. “And proteins,” she added. “And metabolism,” said I. “And a genetic code,” said she. After a short time we both looked wide-eyed at each other and simultaneously shouted, “Naaaahh!” Then we laughed and went back to work, as if it didn’t really matter to our views. I suppose we both thought that, even if we didn’t know how undirected nature could begin life, somebody must know. That’s the impressive power of groupthink.

After three years at my first job as an assistant professor at Queens College in New York City, my new wife, Celeste, our firstborn daughter, Grace, and I moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where a new job awaited at Lehigh University. Several very busy years later I paused to read a book that startled me and changed my view of evolution. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton, a geneticist and medical doctor then teaching in Australia, offered no solution to the riddle of life, but pointed out numerous serious problems for Darwin’s theory at the molecular level that I had never even heard about—even though I was a biochemistry professor whose goal in entering science was to understand how the world worked! At that point, when I thought back, I realized I had never heard any of my teachers critique Darwin’s theory in all of my science studies.

I got mad. Over the following months I spent much time in the science library trying to find papers or books that explained in real detail how random mutation and selection could produce the exceedingly intricate systems routinely studied by biochemistry. I came up completely empty. Although many publications would pay homage to Darwin and a few would spin “Just So” evolutionary tales, none spelled out how his mechanism accounted for complex functional systems. Vague stories had kept me satisfied in the past, but no longer. Now I wanted real answers.

At that point I concluded that I had been led to believe in Darwin’s theory not because of strong evidence for it. Rather, it was for sociological reasons—that simply was the way educated people were expected to think these days. My professors hadn’t been intentionally misleading—that was the framework in which they thought about life too. But from then on I resolved to decide for myself what the evidence showed.

When one starts to treat Darwinism as a hypothesis about the biochemical level of life rather than as an assumption, it takes about ten minutes to conclude it’s radically inadequate. It takes perhaps another ten minutes to realize that the molecular foundation of life was designed, and for effectively the same reason that Anaxagoras, Galen, and Paley reached the same conclusion for visible levels of biology (although, because of progress in science and philosophy, the argument is now necessarily much more detailed and nuanced than their versions): the signature of intelligent activity is the arrangement of disparate parts to fulfill some purpose. The molecular parts of the cell are elegantly arranged to fulfill many subsidiary purposes that must blend together in service of the large overall purpose of forming life. As we’ll see in this book, no unintelligent, undirected process—neither Darwin’s mechanism nor any other—can account for that.

With the aid of the then newfangled internet, over the years I met other academics who had had experiences roughly similar to mine, who had been perfectly willing to accept Darwinian evolution, but at some point realized with shock that the larger theory was an intellectual facade. Like me, most had religious convictions, which freed them from the crippling assumption that—no matter what the evidence showed—unintelligent forces simply must be responsible for the elegance of life. Some of us banded together under the auspices of the Seattle-based think tank Discovery Institute, the better to defend and advance the topic of intelligent design (ID), to which we had become dedicated.

In conversations with them I discovered that, as a biochemist, I had ideas to contribute that the others did not. At the urging of Phillip Johnson, then a professor of law at the University of California–Berkeley, I set about writing a book that in 1996 became Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Except for answering extravagant Darwinian claims or attacks on ID,10 I thought I was done with writing at that point. But the rapid progress of science in the subsequent decade allowed further arguments to be made. In 2007 those became The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, which, as the title suggests, tried to locate the point in life where what can be explained solely by unintelligent forces is reached. (One common confusion of critics is to think that ID argues everything is planned. That’s not the case. Chance is an important, if superficial, feature of biology.) Again I thought I was done, but even greater unanticipated progress in biology over the past ten years has spurred me to write this book.

Where We’re Headed

The firm conclusion I’ve drawn over the past decades is this: despite occasional questions and bumps along the road, the greater the progress of science, the more deeply into life design can be seen to extend. In Darwin’s own day, the mid-nineteenth century, scientists wondered whether there was sufficient variety in nature’s creatures to fuel his theory. After DNA and proteins were discovered in the late twentieth century, a pressing question was whether Darwin’s mechanism—natural selection acting on random mutation—could account for even the biochemical level of life and the sophisticated molecular machinery unexpectedly discovered there.

As science rapidly advanced in the early twenty-first century, large studies showed only surprisingly minor changes in genes under severe selective pressure. And as we’ll see in this book, now several decades into the twenty-first century, ever more sophisticated studies demonstrate that, ironically, random mutation and natural selection are in fact fiercely devolutionary. It turns out that mutation easily breaks or degrades genes, which, counterintuitively, can sometimes help an organism to survive, so the damaged genes are hastily spread by natural selection. Strangely, in the space of a century and a half Darwinism has gone from the chief candidate for the explanation of life to a known threat to life’s long-term integrity.

Here’s how we’ll proceed. The two chapters of Part I introduce major problems facing any theory attempting to account for life. In Chapter 1 I’ll emphasize a philosophical difficulty—the question of how we know what we claim to know. The second chapter of Part I throws down the gauntlet. It describes biological systems of astonishing elegance and complexity that demand explanation; many of them were discovered as recently as the new millennium. Part II examines a number of ideas that have been offered as answers, from Darwin’s own theory to the most recent non-Darwinian accounts of evolution such as neutral theory and natural genetic engineering. We’ll see why, although they may account for some features of life, they all are severely limited in scope.

Part III (Chapters 6 through 9) compiles pertinent evidence from numerous studies on a wide range of species by many insightful investigators. These studies have only become available in the past few decades due to rapid advances in laboratory techniques that closely examine the molecular level of life. The studies indicate that not only is the Darwinian mechanism devolutionary; it is also self-limiting—that is, it actively prevents evolutionary changes at the biological classification level of family and above. After Part IV (described below), the Appendix reexamines criticisms by top scientists and others of my earlier arguments for intelligent design from the clarifying perspective of more than twenty years later.

The failure of Darwin’s mechanism as an explanation for the evolution of all but the lowest levels of biological classification reopens the primordial question of what does account for the elegance and complexity of life. My answer appears mainly in Part IV (the final chapter). There I defend the reality of mind—a necessary foundation of science itself—and argue that, for its own sake, science must explicitly acknowledge mind’s existence. Once the reality of mind is affirmed, the explanation for life follows easily. In brief, although chance surely affects superficial aspects of biology, the newest evidence confirms that life is the intended work of a mind and that that work extends much more deeply into life than could previously be seen.

From introduction to Darwin Devolves

By Michael J. Behe