181 of 240 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Read it with an open mind., June 12, 2007
Just as a massive star bends light, so emotion warps thought when we approach the question of origins. An eminent professor who takes the wrong position on this subject can lose tenure. A less eminent researcher may lose his job. Depite his forty-some peer-reviewed articles and a tenured faculty position, and the careful, measured tone in which he writes, Michael Behe will be called an "ID-iot," his honesty disputed, and anyone who agrees with him dismissed as an ignorant, red-neck hick who can barely muster the cognitive powers of a good high school student.
In such an environment (and if you doubt my appraisal, read some of the reviews below), it takes conscious intent to ignore manipulative appeals to the "argument from sociology" and attend to substance.
For the record, Behe is not an "ID-iot." He is a sharp and thoughtful biologist who doesn't think evolution can work on its own. In this book he argues for common descent, but argues that naturalistic evolution is limitted. He thinks the mechanisms suggested for powering the massive creativity and innovation in nature could not come from mutations alone.
His primary tool for advancing this argument is the evolution of the malaria bug, and of human immune defenses against it, over the past several thousand years. Behe shows that while microbes can and do evolve resistances to medicine, they generally do so by breaking down in some way, as does the human body. Touching briefly on the evolution of e coli and HIV, then on other critters, he makes the case that bugs that evolve rapidly, and through huge communities, demonstrate the limits to naturalistic evolution. The mathematical arguments he brings in to explain and support his more theoretical argument against the power of mutations, which some reviewers take issue with below, are not his main line of persuasion, nor, I admit, do they seem fully persuasive as developed here.
This book is not about Irreducible Complexity (IC). Behe defends the concept, and his examples of it, briefly, but that is not the main line of discussion, critics to the contrary. He's offered a lenghthier defense of IC elsewhere. (While I've read some of his Dover testimony, and some of the summary given in a critic's book, and agree he could have done better at some points, I think carefully considered written articles provide a better forum for ideas than a courtroom drama. As someone who has been known to stutter himself in interviews, I'm not inclined to judge a person's intelligence or argument on how well he holds up against hours of verbal examination by a well-prepared and clever attorney. In Debating Design, he seems to me to do well vs. Kenneth Miller and his famous Type III Secretory System.) But here Behe comes at the question from below, rather from above, looking at the actual known history of recent evolution among well-studied microorganisms. The book is, therefore, a good compliment to Darwin's Black Box.
Read it, and the discussion that will follow (both sides), and make up your own mind. Don't let the raw emotions so in evidence sway you. Behe is right or he is wrong, but he is not a fool. For me, the primary issue remains the frequency and character of beneficial and creative mutations. Looking into the question a bit myself recently, I found a pattern very like what Behe describes. Ironically, it seems to me the best argument against the position Behe stakes out here that I have seen so far is theological. Why would God create the malaria bug? I am still not satisfied that anyone really has the history of life pegged.
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105 of 144 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Important Work, July 13, 2007
After reading the many negative reviews of this book, I decided to read the book from cover to cover. I conclude that the negative reviews do not reflect the total contents of the book. Much of the material in this book is a review of the literature, which almost none of the critics found fault with. One can quibble with Behe's statistics, most of which he relied on those computed by others, but I have concluded that his main point is valid. I and others would find it very helpful if those who disagree with Behe's results to do their own calculations or refer us to the relevant literature. I have done similar calculations, only with mammals, and have concluded that combining mutational probability and the number of mammal life forms that have existed historically paints a far worse picture than Behe documents for bacteria. The number of uncorrected mutations compared with the number of mammals does not provide much hope that Darwinian mechanisms alone could provide the raw material to evolve mammals from their theoretical common ancestor. There are far to few mammals and far too few uncorrected mutations, most all of which, as has been well documented, are detrimental or, worse yet, near neutral. Many if not most mammals have historically, and today, existed in relatively small numbers. Ecologists have estimated how many Pandas, bears, big cats, and other mammals have ever existed, and the numbers are tiny compared to bacteria. The most successful mammals are the rodents and even their number is tiny compared to bacteria. I also found that many of the critical reviews of this book were just plain wrong. One of many examples is the claim that Behe "quickly" dismissed "the Red Queen hypothesis as a 'silly statement' ....ignoring the existence of a substantial body of supporting scientific literature" is irresponsible. Professor Behe is not calling the Red Queen hypothesis silly, but the statement in Louis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Behe then spends much time discussing why he concluded the Red Queen hypothesis may not be correct.
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854 of 1,281 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Edge of Inanity: The Search for the Limits of Credulity, June 6, 2007
Behe's all dog no pony Irreducible Complexity (IC) tour is back in town - fresh from a Dover, PA appearance where he literally brought down the house of Intelligent Design (ID) cards with a slapstick vaudeville routine that confusingly conflated astrology with astronomy, dismissed reams (literally) of research into the evolution of the blood clotting cascade, and routinely produced 'oh dear' deer in the headlights stares while under cross examination.
Much of "The Edge of Evolution" centers on the purported inability of evolutionary mechanisms to account for parasites such as malaria. Behe's preferred instrument of faith-based flagellation - the flagellum - stages an encore performance as the malarial cilium; which to Behe's doe eyes looks even more IC than it did before.
Research is cited to show that the production of cilium in eukaryotic cells depends upon the availability of another cellular system known as intraflagellar transport (IFT). Behe then asserts (as in provides no supporting evidence) that both the cilium and IFT are irreducibly complex - in fact he christens this section "Irreducible Complexity Squared" (note to the Discovery Institute: get that trademark application in soon, how about IC2). Behe writes on page 94:
"IFT exponentially increases the difficulty of explaining the irreducibly complex cilium. It is clear from careful experimental work with all ciliated cells that have been examined, from alga to mice, that a functioning cilium requires a working IFT. The problem of the origin of the cilium is now intimately connected to the problem of the origin of IFT. Before its discovery we could be forgiven for overlooking the problem of how a cilium was built. Biologists could vaguely wave off the problem, knowing that some proteins fold by themselves and associate in the cell without help. Just as a century ago Haeckel thought it would be easy for life to originate, a few decades ago one could have been excused for thinking it was probably easy to put a cilium together; the piece could probably just glom together on their own. But now that the elegant complexity of IFT has been uncovered, we can ignore the question no longer."
IC2 states that you can't have/build/produce cilia without a functioning IFT mechanism - evolutionary (natural) causations must explain the apparently choreographed origin of IFT and the origin of cilia - quod erat demonstrum. Unfortunately this claim is false. In the real world eukaryotes exist which have cilia but lack IFT.
One of these organisms belongs to a group called Apicomplexans. These protozoa are obligatory intracellular parasites that must spend part, if not all, of their life cycle in a host animal. The specific apicomplexan in question is Plasmodium falciparum. You probably know it better by its street name: malaria. The organism that Behe touts throughout as being an intelligently designed exemplar of irreducibly complex systems completely demolishes his entire claim that cilia and IFT constitute an irreducible system - squared or not.
Compounding the Plasmodium falciparum debacle is Behe's rubber-band reality utilization of fitness landscape arguments in a chapter that should have been titled "The Mathematical Limits of Beheism" since it only manages to showcase his profligate innumeracy. Here's how Behe turned a fitness landscape into a swamp (with thanks to Mark Chu-Carroll):
1. Restrict evolution to a static and unchanging fitness landscape - unfortunately in the real world fitness landscapes are never static. 2. Constrain the fitness landscape to a smooth surface made up of hills and valleys where a local minimum or maximum in any dimension is a local minimum or maximum in all dimensions - and ignore that a valley in one dimension can be a peak in another. 3. Assert that fitness function mapping from a genome to a point of the fitness landscape is monotonically increasing - in spite of the fact that things don't always go in a single direction - for example a virus may decrease in fitness over time but increase in transmissibility. 4. Define the fitness function as smoothly continuous, with infinitesimally small changes (single point base changes) mapping to equally small changes in position on the fitness landscape - in spite of experimental evidence that even a single base pair change (in a viral quasispecies for example) can eliminate one peak while creating another (and also ignore the consequences of gene duplication, recombination, insertional mutations, transposition, and translocation).
As Mark points out Behe doesn't even understand that he is making these assumptions - you can wade through his mathematics without getting your ankles wet. He then traipses into quicksand of his own design by basing all of his arguments on the flawed fitness landscape and straightjacketed search results they produce. William Dembski acted as an advisor to Behe - and it shows. The master of obscurantist pseudomathematics has found a willing apprentice.
Transmuting lush fitness landscapes into malarial swamps is quite a trick but Behe, ever the prankster, isn't finished yet. Behe accepts common descent and admits that overwhelming evidence links closely related species (e.g. humans and chimpanzees) to shared ancestors, but flatly asserts that evolution by natural means is incapable of facilitating genus or taxa level differentiation such as the emergence of tetrapods from Sarcopterygian fish. The horns of this dilemma should be obvious, even to Behe; how can all species be linked by common descent if evolution above the species level is impossible?
Behe never resolves this disconnect - no mechanism is ever offered. No hint of a hypothesis. No suggested experimental avenues. This logical lacuna can't be bridged by incessant appeals to 'design.' Behe further muddies the waters by surreptitiously substituting a concept much closer to creationist 'baramin' (created kinds) for biological species - created kinds and common descent are irreconcilable concepts.
Ultimately Behe's colleagues at Lehigh University are ideally positioned to comment on his work. The Department of Biological Sciences has posted the following statement on their website concerning Behe:
"The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others."
"The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of 'intelligent design.' While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific."
Behe's book is one long train wreck. Unlike Darwin who eloquently elucidated one long argument, Behe tosses off sloppy seconds as research, recycles sophomoric (and rejected) fitness landscape arguments, confusingly conflates or redefines common terms and proffers puerile probability assessments - standard creationist (excuse me, I meant to say IDist) fare.
Thanks to Nick Matzke for uncovering Behe's monumentally grotesque Plasmodium falciparum gaffe.
Special thanks as well to Behe's dysfunctional advisory team: Lydia and Tim McGrew, Peter and Paul Nelson, George Hunter, David DeWitt, Doug Axe, Bill Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Tony Jelsma, Neil Manson, Jay Richards, Guillermo Gonzalez, Bruce Chapman, Steve Meyer, John West, and Rob Crowther - a veritable bestiary of methodological supernaturalists operating at the edge of inanity - and only one 's' away from insanity.
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