Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution PDF

Rating: (110 reviews) Author: Michael J. Behe ISBN : 9780743290319 New from $12.98 Format: PDF

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Review

"A persuasive book. It will speak to the layman and perhaps even to professional evolutionists as well, if they are able to suspend for a little while their own judgment about origins, the ultimate black box." -- The Washington Times

"An argument of great originality, elegance, and intellectual power. . . . No one can propose to defend Darwin without meeting the challenges set out in this superbly written and compelling book." -- David Berlinski, author of A Tour of the Calculus

"Overthrows Darwin at the end of the twentieth century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning." -- George Gilder in National Review

"[Behe] is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known." -- H. Allen Orr in The New Yorker

"When examined with the powerful tools of modern biology, but not with its modern prejudices, life on a biochemical level can be a product, Behe says, only of intelligent design. Coming from a practicing biologist. . . this proposition is close to heretical." -- The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Michael J. Behe is a Professor of Biological Science at Lehigh University, where he has worked since 1985. From 1978 to 1982 he did postdoctoral work on DNA structure at the National Institutes of Health. From 1982 to 1985 he was Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Queens College in New York City. He has authored more than forty technical papers, but he is best known as the author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. He lives near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with his wife and nine children.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 2nd edition (March 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743290313
• ISBN-13: 978-0743290319
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.5 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution PDF

Behe wrote in the Preface to this 1996 book, "Darwin was ignorant of the reason for variation within a species... It was once expected that the basis of life would be exceedingly simple. That expectation has been smashed... the elegance and complexity of biological systems at the molecular level have paralyzed science's attempt to account for the origin of specific, complex biomolecular systems..." (Pg. x) He clarifies, "I have no reason to doubt that the universe is ... billions of years old ... I find the idea of common descent ... fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it... Although Darwin's mechanism ... might explain many things... I do not believe it explains molecular life." (Pg. 5-6) [NOTE: page numbers refer to the 307-page hardcover editon.]

He notes, "Darwin convinced many of his readers that an evolutionary pathway leads from the simplest light-sensitive spot to the sophistaced camera-eye of man. But the question of how vision began remained unanswered... he did not even try to explain where his starting point---the relatively simple light-sensitive spot---came from." (Pg. 18) He states, "Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes... Anatomy is... irrelevant to the question of whether evolution could take place on the molecular level. So is the fossil record... Until recently, evolutionary biologists could be unconcerned with the molecular details of life because so little was known about them. Now the black box of the cell has been opened, and the infinitesimal world that stands revealed must be explained." (Pg. 22)

He asks, "What type of biological system could not be formed by 'numerous, successive, slight modifications'? ...

Behe's prose is engaging and enjoyable, but this attempt to refute the theory of evolution does not convince.

The basic thesis of Behe's book is that though the theory of evolution may explain the fossil record and the anatomies of living things, it cannot explain the microscopic functioning of, for example, vision, the bacterial flagellum, and the immune system (p. 22). Indeed, Behe argues that evolutionary biology has been completely silent on the subject of how a cell's molecular machinery has evolved: "No one at Harvard University, no one at the National Institutes of Health, no member of the National Academy of Sciences. . . can give a detailed account of how the cilium, or vision, or blood clotting, or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a Darwinian fashion" (p. 187. Compare pp. 179, 185).

On the basis of this alleged silence, Behe suggests a return to William Paley's famous "watchmaker" argument (aka the argument from design): if a microbiological structure is "irreducibly complex" (defined on p. 39), Behe says, it cannot have evolved, and so must have been the work of an Intelligent Designer.

Unfortunately, this house of cards is built on balderdash. Searches of PubMed and similar databases for terms like "evolution of rhodopsin" and "evolution of flagellum" turn up detailed discussions of the evolution of microscopic biological processes dating back to the 1970s, to say nothing of books like The Molecular Evolution of Life (1986).

This book also has an unfortunate tendency to misrepresent biology and what biologists say about it.