Customer Reviews

The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism

5 star:		(72)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

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.

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.

In the Debacle in Dover, testifying about biochemistry, his main area of expertise, Behe frequently looked like a complete ID-iot. In EOE, Behe spends substantial time discussing areas outside his main ariea of expertise: zoology, astrophysics, developmental biology, etc. Question: If Behe couldn't survive cross-examination in his main area of expertise, then why should we trust him about other areas?

Besides that troubling, general question, there are several specific items that indicate that Behe simply cannot be trusted to get his facts straight. While some reviewers have identified some fairly esoteric errors, I would like to highlight more basic errors, errors so fundamental that a reasonably knowledgeable high school student would catch them.

Behe claims that his previous book, "Darwin's Black Box" (DBB), showed that irreducibly complex (IC) systems could not possibly have evolved in a step-by-step manner, but in reality DBB never said any such thing. DBB argued only that "direct" evolution was highly unlikely. Not only does that still leave the door open for "indirect" evolution, but "highly unlikely" is obviously not the same thing as "impossible." A reasonably sharp high school student would recognize both of those serious errors.

Behe also has a nasty habit of moving the goalposts on an ad hoc basis. Sometimes Behe claims that IC systems meet the standard set by Darwin himself: "could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications." Under that standard, merely plausible evolutionary pathways would be effective rebuttals of Behe's IC claims; but whenever biologists mention the numerous, plausible pathways that are already known to exist, Behe suddenly changes the standard to "rigorous, detailed explanations." Even a high school student would recognize that "rigorous, detailed explanations" is a radically different standard from "plausible." Behe's glaring inconsistency on such a key point seems to imply deliberate deception.

Some of Behe's statistical arguments assume that evolutionary success involves finding a needle in a haystack, i.e., a single, specific combination of mutations. In reality, as Behe himself implies in discussing the "Red Queen" effect, there is frequently a large, possibly an enormous, number of potentially beneficial combinations available; so evolution is not searching for a needle, rather it is searching for a haystack; and therefore the chances for success are enormously greater than Behe's statistical arguments imply. Any reasonably sharp high school student would recognize the glaring flaw in Behe's deceptive statistics.

Creationists with limited math abilities seem greatly impressed even by math arguments as obviously stupid as Behe's. I think it's worthwhile to point out that the most influential statistician of the 20th century was probably Sir Ronald Fisher, who, in addition to his spectacular achievements in statistics, also happens to have been one of the most influential evolutionists of the 20th century, having been one of the principal proponents of the "modern synthesis." So when ID-iots like Behe start bloviating about statistics, just remember that the real expert in statistics, Sir Ronald Fisher, was an evolutionist.

Finally, in another key argument, Behe simply assumes that "fitness landscapes" never change, but anyone with even a high school level knowledge of earth science knows that physical landscapes change all the time, due to floods, earthquakes, erosion, etc. Is Behe really so clueless that he doesn't realize that if physical landscapes change, then "fitness landscapes" must change too? Behe's idea of an organism "trapped on a fitness peak," forever barred from crossing even a shallow valley and thereby potentially gaining access to a even higher peak is so obviously stupid that any reasonably knowledgeable high school student would reject it.

I fully realize that not everyone can catch every error. Even major errors, like some of those pointed out by other critics, might slip by if they involve obscure or highly technical details. But it is really baffling that five-star reviewers blithely overlook numerous, major blunders that any knowledgeable high school student would catch. How in God's name could that happen?

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.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, the great Russian-American population geneticist (One of the prominent biologists responsible for the Modern Synthesis Theory of Evolution.), observed that "Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". It was true when he stated that decades ago; it is truer still today given the abundant wealth of excellent data from a diverse host of biological sciences: molecular biology and biochemistry, developmental biology, ecology, population genetics, systematics and paleobiology. All of which points clearly to both the fact of biological evolution and the key role of Natural Selection in producing the rich biological diversity of our Planet Earth. Claims which biochemist Michael Behe has tried so valiantly to deny in his "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism", proclaiming that Intelligent Design, not Evolution, is the best explanation for our planet's biodiversity. However, all that Michael Behe has demonstrated so well in his latest diatribe against "Darwinism" is the constricted, twisted limits of his own scientific thought via extensive illogical reasoning, an improper understanding of probability theory, and a profound ignorance of evolutionary biology. Indeed, in his latest book, Michael Behe has descended into the dark, deep abyss of reason; it's a senseless journey that any thoughtful potential reader of his book should refuse to undertake.

In the opening chapter "The Elements of Darwinism", Behe presents a stereotypical portrait of "Darwinism", or rather, the Modern Synthesis Theory of Evolution, hinting that he's found excellent examples that refute it in his cursory examinations of the origins and transmittal of the diseases Malaria and HIV/AIDS. He also briefly alludes to the notion of an adaptive landscape that's played such a crucial role in our understanding of population genetics and speciation, presented all too simplistically as if his intended audience was teenagers with limited attention spans, not presumably well-read, highly educated, adults. In the second chapter, "Arms Race or Trench Warfare?", Behe ridicules the very notion of a co-evolutionary arms race between predators and prey, quickly dismissing the Red Queen hypothesis as a "silly statement" from Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", ignoring the existence of a substantial body of supporting scientific literature (Like so many great ideas in science, it was proposed independently, almost simultaneously, by two scientists; evolutionary biologist and paleobiologist Leigh Van Valen - who coined the term "Red Queen" - and evolutionary ecologist Michael Rosenzweig in the early 1970s. I should also note too that this was demonstrated clearly in the PBS "Evolution" television miniseries episode which illustrated the Red Queen through an intricate biochemical "arms race" between garter snakes and their highly toxic salamander prey.). In the chapter entitled "The Mathematical Limits of Darwinism", Michael Behe offers some bizarre probability values (How did you compute them, Professor Behe, using which probability distribution? A Normal Distribution? A Binomial Distribution? A Poisson Distribution - that would make ample sense if the events described by him are indeed as rare as he states.) that purportedly support his contention of rare, random variation as something highly unlikely to produce anything other than the microevolution he does allude to, but never mentions explicitly (I am indebted to another Amazon.com customer reviewer, S. Allen, for pointing out the egregious error which Behe made in computing the probability of a malarial parasite producing a double mutation - and also erring in assuming that these mutations had to occur together, when the original scientific paper he cited from strongly implied that they did not (I'll let the reader decide as to whether this was indeed wishful thinking on Behe's part, or a gross distortion of the available published scientific evidence; I am inclined to believe the latter, because of other similar examples I have spotted elsewhere in this book.).).

More than half of "The Edge of Evolution" is devoted to pointing out the foibles of evolution as if random mutation was the key mechanism responsible for natural selection and then trotting out Intelligent Design as the more reasonable explanation for biological diversity, by stating once more, arguments he presented in his earlier book "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution". Surprisingly Behe refers again to his "mousetrap model" in support of his concept of "Irreducible Complexity", without acknowledging Kenneth Miller's effectively brilliant, devastating refutation which is posted at his personal website, <...>. Behe gets so mired in discussing the details of his biological "nanobots", that he forgets the real reason why he refers to them, as the mechanistic rationale for explaining Earth's past and present biodiversity as an artifact of Intelligent Design. Moreover, he does not offer any compelling alternative hypotheses that would support Intelligent Design as a more likely scientific theory accounting for this diversity. Instead, he refers again, and again, to how well-designed various cellular structures are, as if the citations by themselves, clearly demonstrate that these structures were indeed the products of Intelligent Design.

My most serious reservations about "The Edge of Evolution" are not just limited to Behe's failure to demonstrate convincingly, from a scientific perspective, that Intelligent Design is a better theory than the Modern Synthesis Theory of Evolution (which has the Darwin/Wallace Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection as its central core.). Repeatedly, Behe has resorted to simplistic logical reasoning in trying to persuade his audience of the merit of his ideas (For example, in the chapter, "Arms Race or Trench Warefare?" he describes the co-evolutionary arms race between the ancestors of the modern cheetah and the gazelle in a literary style that's more suited for Aesop's Fables than a book that purportedly tries to present a viable scientific alternative to evolutionary theory.). He also misinterprets "The Spandrels of San Marco", the classic scientific paper by paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould and population geneticist Richard Lewontin, in the chapter entitled "The Cathedral And The Spandrels", as a sterling example of Darwinism's failure, when that was not the authors' rationale for its writing nor how it is perceived today by many evolutionary biologists. While claiming to accept the reality of evolution as evidence for common descent, he ignores the fossil record, in instances like his terse dismissal of the Red Queen, and thus neglects the importance of appreciating the history of life in attempting to understand the origins of Planet Earth's current biodiversity (For example, distinguished marine ecologist Geerat Vermeij has offered substantial evidence of a co-evolutionary arms race from his extensive studies of the marine fossil record; a most remarkable achievement since Vermeij has been blind almost from birth. Vermeij discusses this in admirable, eloquent prose in his book "Evolution and Escalation".). Behe doesn't appreciate the importance of the adaptive landscape - which he refers to as the "fitness landscape" - towards our understanding of the processes responsible for speciation, wrongly attributing it to British population geneticist Ronald Fisher, when it was actually derived by his American counterpart, Sewall Wright (Both of whom made key contributions to the Modern Synthesis theory - which Behe refers to as the "Neo-Darwinian Synthesis" - yet another incorrect usage of scientific terminology which appears too often in this book.). Last, but not least, Michael Behe lacks the literary eloquence of superb writers - and evolutionary biologists - Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, Edward O. Wilson, and Richard Dawkins, to name but a few, and he has offered to us, his unsuspecting readers, the literary equivalent of the RMS Titantic's ill-fated maiden voyage.

Simon and Schuster truly has had a glorious history of introducing many distinguished writers of fiction and non-fiction to the world, ranging from the likes of Ernest Hemingway to Frank McCourt. It published distinguished evolutionary biologist and paleobiologist Niles Eldrdege's first book for the general public, "Time Frames", an engrossing memoir on the origins of the evolutionary theory known as "Punctuated Equilibrium" (which Eldredge proposed with his friend Stephen Jay Gould back in 1972). Regrettably, its excellent publishing history was tarnished with the original publication of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution"; now it is tarnished again with "The Edge of Evolution". Clearly Michael Behe doesn't deserve favorable recognition of the kind bestowed upon both Hemingway and McCourt, but rather, more intense scrutiny, and indeed, more condemnation, in the future, from his scientific peers and an interested public who recognizes that Intelligent Design is not just bad science, but a bad religious idea pretending to be science (The verdict which was issued by Republican Federal Judge John Jones at the conclusion of the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District trial in which Michael Behe appeared as a key witness for the defense; oddly enough he doesn't mention the trial nor its verdict in his book.). Those who believe he is due favorable recognition are condoning the ample lies, omissions, and distortions present in his latest book, and are all too willing to join him in his self-created abyss of reason.

(EDITORIAL NOTE 9/5/07: Since writing the original text of this review, I have arrived at the realization that Behe's "The Edge Of Evolution" is yet another example from him of mendacious intellectual pornography. His data on the "mathematical limits to Darwinism" with respect to the Plasmodium malarial parasite, can be explained best as an excellent example of coevolution. Indeed, I recently posted this rebuttal to yet another dismal favorable review of Behe's book:

What Behe has argued with regards to the "malaria mutation" has been discussed extensively online and elsewhere by Nick Matzke, Mark Chu-Carroll, Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne and Ken Miller, and here, at Amazon.com, by S. Allen. Behe has misinterpreted published scientific evidence regarding it. Furthermore he has displayed a dismal understanding of probability theory and statistics as best expressed in his so-called "mathematical limits to Darwinism". Indeed his frequent citation of the Plasmodium malarial parasite in "The Edge of Evolution" doesn't demonstrate the "mathematical limits to Darwinism", but instead, a superb example of coevolution as seen from the perspective of a pharmaceutical "arms race" between Plasmodium and humanity. Instead of "outstanding work", "The Edge of Evolution" should be viewed instead as yet another example of mendacious intellectual pornography from Professor Behe.)

(EDITORIAL NOTE 9/8/11: In response to Thomas McDonald's risible commentary, replete in its breathtaking inanity, that he posted earlier today, I sent him a private e-mail message which includes these remarks:

Maybe you are not familiar with the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District trial in 2005, which was presided by a fellow Conservative (and then a Republican, appointed to the Federal bench by President George W. Bush), John Jones, but I recommend you read his ruling of December 20, 2005, in which he notes correctly that Intelligent Design is not science (Surprisingly Behe doesn't mention this at all in his book. Maybe he wants to forget how he was cross-examined mercilessly - but also rightfully so - by the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Eric Rothschild, who made an excellent demonstration as to how much an idiot Behe really is.).

However, allow me to address your key points that "Darwinism expects life to Darwinism expects us to believe that life originated or appeared 'by sheer chance'. Also, when you say 'mutations are only random with respect to fitness' are you then granting that mutations may be characterized as teleologically directed, even though that teleological direction has no guarantee, i.e, is random, in specific regard of fitness to environment?" First, you are confusing a theory on the origins of life with "Darwinism", the latter by which you mean the Darwin/Wallace Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection (which has been subsumed within the Modern Synthesis Theory of Evolution). Neither Natural Selection nor other elements of the Modern Synthesis Theory explain the origins of life on earth - which is fundamentally a question of planetary geology, physics and chemistry - but instead, explains the history and current composition of Planet Earth's biodiversity, which neither Intelligent Design nor any other form of "scientific creationism" has done, period. Second, Smokey is absolutely correct, but to elaborate further, mutations are random only with respect to the physical and biological factors influencing the population in which the mutation(s) occur, and these are constrained by the prior geneaological history - what, in biology is regarded as phylogenetic history - of the population in question. In plain English, mutations are not really random at all, and yet you, and other creationists, persist in thinking so.

May I suggest that you look at the American Museum of Natural History's website, under past exhibitions, and read the material on the Darwin exhibition? May I also suggest that you read Michael Shermer's "Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design" and my friend Ken Miller's "Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul" (Ken was the lead witness for the plaintiffs at the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial; many years ago, as an undergraduate at our undergraduate alma mater - where he is now a professor of biology - I assisted him in his very first debate against a "scientific" creationist.). Unlike Shermer, who is an atheist, Ken is a devout Roman Catholic Christian (You may also find useful his earlier "Finding Darwin's God".).)

"It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics." -Richard Dawkins-

"It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." -Richard Dawkins-

The treatment given evolution in EoE barely veils Behe's astonishingly poor grasp of the subject, an inexcusable, unforgivable and embarrassing impropriety for any biologist let alone a PhD biochemist endeavoring to write a book on the subject. This ignorance, apparently, constitutes a useful asset to the ID movement, however, since its proponents avoid formally, accurately or even honestly engaging real science at all cost. Indeed, ignorance alone is not enough to fully explain the tortuously ad hoc, forlornly illusory and Christian friendly "science" promulgated by EoE. As tempting as it is, however, I will forgo treatment of Behe's dishonesty at this time. His math is also quite easily attacked, but this has been done quite admirably by others before me. His ignorance of evolutionary biology has yet to be addressed, however, and is, in any case, a much more tempting target for me.

EoE makes several assertions that I think represent Behe's grasp of evolutionary biology fairly well. The problem for Behe is, however, they demonstrate bewilderment on a par with possibly the least astute of creationist minds. I had the opportunity to present some of them to a group of relatively intelligent high school graduates (and science majors to be) with whom I have the pleasure of working over the summer. They turned out to be surprisingly more adept at evolutionary science than Behe. The following passages were taken from EoE. I invite you to witness Behe's astonishing ignorance for yourselves:

BEHE WRITES: "The defense of vertebrates from invasion by microscopic predators is the job of the immune system, yet hemoglobin is not part of the immune system. Hemoglobin's main job is as part of the respiratory system, to carry oxygen to tissues. Using hemoglobin to fight off malaria is an act of utter desperation, like using a TV set to plug a hole in the Hoover Dam." (pp. 29-30)

AND

"A second point is that the mutations are not in the process of joining to build a more complex, interactive biochemical system... A related point is that neither hemoglobin mutation occurs in the immune system... So the mutations are neither making a new system nor even adding to an established one" (p. 34).

Behe is so clueless, so confused, so desperate and so wrong that he can't help but inadvertently shoot himself in the foot from time to time. The above quotes exemplify this perfectly. With these, Behe all but destroys his own case for what he calls "irreducible complexity." A journey outside the world of the microscopic might be helpful in understanding why.

Consider a bird and its wings for example. In most cases these wings are used to fly and are quite well adapted to that task. Not all birds fly, however, and some, in fact, put their wings to significantly different uses. Cormorants are an excellent case in point. Unless one deems their pelagic antics as such, they have lost the ability to fly entirely. In its newly assumed part-time aquatic milieu however, the cormorant's cartoonishly small and awkward wings are instantly transformed from mere vestiges of flight to fairly utile if obviously roughhewn "fins." The cormorants wings in this case represent the very TV set plugging the hole in Behe's dam analogy. This is precisely the sort of thing survival often requires of organisms in nature. Evolved structures are often put to use at tasks for which they did not evolve. As an organisms environment changes, this inevitably becomes necessary. If evolution was not a fact, given the findings of geology, most life forms on earth would be extinct right now. When it becomes necessary to adapt to changing conditions, diets, predators, lifestyles,... etc., wings and legs become fins, Jawbones enable hearing, tongues become lures and forelimbs become wings. An animal moving from land to an aquatic environment does not loose its legs and then evolve fins anew "part" by "part." Legs become fins. This is why some manatees still have toenails on their flippers.

Evolution has no clue what "parts" or "functions" are and can neither predict the future nor plan for it. Since evolution also lacks cognizance of Behe's circumscription, it retains at its disposal quicker, more efficient and less costly means of producing adaptations in living organisms than Behe's "part" by "part," step by step scenario. Parts may hence be co-opted or exapted for functions they can approximate until natural selection better adapts them to those functions. Mind you, this is not the result of any sentient decision making. It is driven by an organisms active efforts to survive within its environment. Just a simple change in diet brought on by a drought, for example, will introduce selective pressures effecting adaptations in already present structures to deal with that change. Finch beaks readily come to mind.

The cormorants wings did not evolve for swimming and we can all pretty much see that. We can't, however, see the type III secretory system or a bacterial flagellum. As such, it is difficult for most non-scientists to conceptualize its many parts as they relate to the structure, functioning and survival of a bacterial cell. Throw in a few big fancy words or names and the situation worsens dramatically. This dynamic virtually assures IC an uncritical and accepting audience among the religious. The truth is, however, exaptation can and does occur on the molecular level. Although it wasn't his intention to, Behe himself points this out. Hemoglobin did not specifically evolve for the task, but it has, nonetheless, been co-opted for use in fighting disease. The type III secretory system is an already evolved structure present within some bacterial cells and readily available for co-option. In this regard, it is no different from the cormorants wings which have been similarly co-opted for use as fins. It wouldn't make sense to demand functional part by part intermediates to wings used for swimming without accounting for their prior function. Unless we remain mindful of changing functions, it's just as senseless to demand functional part by part intermediates for pumps that have been adapted to bacterial motility or oxygen binding proteins that have been adapted to destroying bacteria.

WHAT BEHE SAID: "How could a gazelle better avoid a faster cheetah? One way... is to become faster itself. But another way might be to become better at making quick turns... Or to develop stronger horns for defense. Or tougher skin. Or grow bigger. Or develop camouflage. Or graze where cheetahs aren't. Or when cheetahs are asleep. Or close to a forest in which to hide. Or any of a hundred other strategies. Or all of the above. Like the many different ways human genes can change to fend off malaria, gazelles could change in many unconnected ways" (p. 41)

HOW A COLLEGE FRESHMAN WOULD RESPOND: Cheetahs and gazelles evolve in a very delicately balanced and intricate relationship. Secondly adaptations in the gazelle population will necessarily occur slowly as is typical of most evolutionary change. Gazelles, therefore, won't likely outpace cheetahs so drastically as to render them incapable of countering with evolutionary adaptations of their own. An important point to remember also is that cheetahs cannot simply forgo hunting gazelles merely because of a slight (and gradual) change in the gazelle population. In case it needs to be pointed out to you Mr. Behe, cheetahs can't catch buffalo, zebra, eland or giraffe and they don't fare too well with gnus either. Gazelles are their staple and a perfect prey species for them. Whatever gazelles do to avoid cheetahs will necessarily induce a counter in cheetahs. Would you simply starve to death if you awoke one day to find that the neighborhood grocery store had moved into a larger and better stocked building two blocks further down the street or would you make the longer trek? Would you go looking for the grocery store on Juniper avenue even though you knew or suspected it moved to Tulip? Cheetahs too would grow bigger, or hunt where gazelles are, or develop keener eye sight or... I'm sure you get the picture. It just so happened that speed was the trait that each animal developed, but whatever evolutionary path these animals took, Your argument would be the same since all you have to work with are two fully evolved animals and an imagination handicapped by faith. To put it another way, the dice have been tossed and you can see the outcome. You can't conceive of another because your limited imagination impedes your ability to handle all variables involved with the outcome in the first place. Each die has six sides, not all of which you are capable of seeing.

Incidentally, wouldn't you agree that convergent evolution makes a case for the likely development of certain features in certain environments? Isn't it reasonable to expect animals that spend their entire lives on wide open plains to develop speed and/or stamina as a survival strategy? New World vultures are unrelated to Old World vultures, yet share an uncanny resemblance. No evolutionary biologist alive believes their featherless heads the result of "dumb luck" however. Apparently, featherless heads provide an adaptive advantage to birds that feed exclusively on carrion. Perhaps if you tell them it's okay to, vultures will start sporting Mohawks, mullets and dreadlocks. I doubt it though, since indirect evolution continues to wriggle around your most strident efforts to abnegate it.

WHAT BEHE SAID: "When chloroquine is no longer used to treat malaria patients in a region, the mutant strain of P. falciparum declines and the original strain makes a comeback, indicating that the mutant is weaker than the original strain in the absence of the toxic chloroquine" (p. 51).

HOW A COLLEGE FRESHMAN WOULD RESPOND: Describing the "mutant strain" as "weaker" in this instance is misleading as genetic drift all but assures regression to a prior form once a selective pressure no longer exists. Organisms under non-varying selective pressures should logically be expected to fall into somewhat of a genotypic equilibrium with their environment. Keep in mind also that mother nature is infinitely more patient and more persistent than man. She has also been acting far longer and will continue to even after we cease to exist. The sorts of changes we accredit to her are well within her means.

As an aside, In making the above claim, you contradict your assertion that organisms atop a fitness peak are stuck once there.

WHAT BEHE SAID:
"Answer: the obstacle that malaria hasn't been able to mutate around.
Question: what is sickle cell hemoglobin" (p. 52)

HOW A COLLEGE FRESHMAN WOULD RESPOND:
Answer: no
Question: is malaria in any current danger of extinction for lack of not having evolved a strategy to deal with sickle cell hemoglobin?
(I doubt you understand the significance of this since you have yet to display any real understanding of evolutionary science.). You can't say such a mutation has never arisen or does not currently exist because malaria has never been "pressured" to show it. A mutation of that sort can only be selected and hence revealed if the bacteria without it are eliminated. This would call for a human population almost entirely stricken with sickle cell disease. That is the only thing that will bring it out of hiding. The bottom line is things do not exist to evolve, they evolve to exist.

WHAT BEHE SAID: "Despite ten million years of evolution with quadrillions of fish under relentless, life and death selective pressure, the Antarctic antifreeze protein does not have anything like the sophistication and complexity even of such a simple protein as hemoglobin, let alone that of the stupendous, multiprotein systems that are plentiful in nature." (p. 82)

HOW A COLLEGE FRESHMAN WOULD RESPOND: Mr. Behe, wouldn't it be wonderful if humans had wings and could fly (unlike the poor cormorant)? How about lungs to breath under water? Or eyes in the back of our heads? We are the way we are and yet amazingly, we exist. Those fish are doing just fine with the antifreeze protein they do have. How would a college freshman know this? Simple. The fish exist. No selective pressure has acted upon them that would require them to now be in possession of anything more sophisticated than what they currently have. If that was the case, they would either have it or face extinction. Once again Mr. Behe things don't exist to evolve, they evolve to exist.

WHAT BEHE SAID: "A telltale signature of planning is the coherent ordering of steps toward a goal. Random mutation, on the other hand, is incoherent; that is, any given evolutionary step taken by a population of organisms is unlikely to be connected to its predecessor." (p. 104)

HOW A COLLEGE FRESHMAN WOULD RESPOND: Boy are you clueless. Mutations are indeed random and unconnected, but the very real and pressing need to survive does not embrace all mutations equally. Selection, whether artificial or natural, is the guiding force behind evolution and it is more coherent than anything you have thus far spat up. If selection ceases to be coherent, which it fortunately can't, mass extinctions are inevitable.

WHAT BEHE SAID: "Because random mutation and natural selection have no goal, Darwinian evolution faces the huge problem of incoherence: like a drunkard's walk, the next evolutionary step a population of organisms takes is very likely to be unconnected to the last step. The upshot is that even if a gradual route toward a complex structure exists - even one with no missing steps - if the route is lengthy enough, the likelihood of reaching it by random mutation is terrible." (p. 113)

HOW A COLLEGE FRESHMAN WOULD RESPOND: Unconscious though it is, random mutation and natural selection does indeed have a goal and it is S-U-R-V-I-V-A-L. As I have stated before, mutations are random, but for them to affect a population in any meaningful way, they must first pass through the very coherent and ever vigilant sieve of natural selection. An albino juvenile croc being devoured by its cannibalistic kin is the epitome of coherence. So are zebra fleeing a watering hole in fright at the sight of a white log drifting toward them. A river filled with albino crocs, on the other hand, is very incoherent. If this last scenario was possible (which, luckily for crocodiles, natural selection prevents) crocodiles would literally have to change everything about the way they live just to barely survive if at all. Unless dead logs turn white and the Nile courses with milk, an albino croc is at a distinct disadvantage as an ambush hunter. Then again, it's not likely to ever have to worry about snatching zebras, wildebeest or gazelles off embankments as adult crocs famously do. The sore thumb that it is, an albino croc is far likelier to end up a meal itself, and long before ever having to deal with the likes of an adult zebra or, more significantly, reproducing and passing on its genes.

WHAT BEHE SAID: "If so, then in a rugged evolutionary landscape, it is much more likely that a species will climb a tiny hill and get stuck there, unable to become less fit, yet forever isolated from the surrounding peaks. Random mutation and natural selection can't solve the rugged landscape dilemma - they actually cause the dilemma." (p. 114)

HOW A COLLEGE FRESHMAN WOULD RESPOND: remember this? "When chloroquine is no longer used to treat malaria patients in a region, the mutant strain of P. falciparum declines and the original strain makes a comeback, indicating that the mutant is weaker than the original strain in the absence of the toxic chloroquine." Those were your words Mr. Behe. So which is it, are organisms "unable to become less fit" once they climb a fitness peak, or can they revert to prior presumably "stronger" forms if their environment dictates it? Incidentally, have you done much reading on cave fish? How about tapeworms? Putting these minor quibbles aside (need I point out that this is sarcasm?), I don't think it necessary to spend too much time on this particular argument. Fitness landscapes are obviously not static which they need to be for this argument to stand.

WHAT BEHE SAID: "To trap mice, a deep hole in the ground might do just fine. Yet a hole in the ground isn't a route to the standard mechanical mousetrap... A splotch of glue can catch a mouse, but can't be turned into a mechanical trap." (p. 122)

Let me take this opportunity to give a brief lesson on one of the ways in which evolution progresses.

Mr. Behe, until you get this concept clear you will never be able to fully understand evolutionary science: evolution doesn't plan for the future. It works with what it has to solve problems as they emerge. You say as much in your book, but have yet to demonstrate a true grasp of the full implications of this statement. The fact that the standard mouse trap does not employ a hole or a splotch of glue simply means that evolution had at least one other more viable or convenient and, therefore, likelier pathway to a mousetrap at its disposal (pretending mousetraps can evolve). Evolution, in other words, never sets out to make things in any particular way. It uses what it has and it logically has to because plants and animals can only survive using what they have. Dogs, for example, did not evolve for an aquatic lifestyle, but a dog stuck on a sinking boat in the middle of a lake will swim to shore rather than sink with the boat and drown in the lake. A dog, however, can only swim to safety through the use of its legs. The ancestors of manatees were also restricted to swimming with their legs, only in their case, for whatever reason, swimming became a necessity for survival. This created a "pressure" for structures that could adequately perform the task. Selection readily occurs in this context. A quadruped needing "fins" to improve fitness, in an aquatic environment realistically can only adopt legs to this function. They won't grow fins from scratch because there likely wont be a "pressure" to. Its legs are what a quadruped is likely to swim and hence compete with (in an aquatic setting) in the first place and it is those legs that will likely encounter selective pressure to change; to become "fins."

Mother nature is nothing if not lazy. She is also very creative, very frugal and very resourceful. Though evolution could build this mousetrap from scratch if need be, it will opt for a quicker more efficient and less expensive route if one exists. An already present "part" could be co-opted or exapted and used to approximate the "function" of a mousetrap (remember the cormorant`s wings or the TV set plugging the hole in the dam?). Though this "part" might initially have evolved for a "purpose" far different from that of mousetrap, a change in the environment could have made its prior role no longer critical or necessary for survival (the ancestors of cormorants needed flight to survive, but the cormorant no longer does.). Over time and under continuous selective pressure, this pseudo mousetrap evolves to become more streamlined and more efficient at catching mice. It also further evolves or co-opts other structures and begins to take on the form of the traditional mousetrap. Before long, all "parts" are integrally united into a thoroughly well "designed" and streamlined whole so perfectly suited for its "function" that it is hard to imagine how the whole could have evolved in the first place (the cormorant needs only look at a penguin to see what is possible.). Evolution, however, is not prophecy. Plants and animals as we see them today have already traveled an extensive evolutionary path. Their current forms are not fulfilled prophecies, but contingencies playing to the whims of a capricious and unforgiving world. If evolution creates a mousetrap made of a wooden platform, a spring, and a wire catch, it does so not because it sets out to, but because those things are what were likely already available to it. Evolution uses what it has because it has to.

WHAT BEHE SAID: "In other words, while we have studied it, HIV has run the gamut of all possible substitution mutations, a gamut that would require billions of years for cells to experience. Yet all those mutations have changed the virus very little." (p. 154)

RESPONSE: Do you understand the concept of selection? I wear size 34 by 34 pants. This has been the case since I was eighteen. Suffice it to say I'm much older now. I'm not going to buy size 40 pants simply because I can afford them. I think I look rather sexy in my size 34's, but more than just that, they are a very comfortable fit for me. The point is, Mr. Behe, Humans have not changed a lick since HIV was discovered. HIV cannot be expected to evolve strategies for conditions that don't exist. No matter how quickly HIV reproduces you won't see any significant evolutionary changes in it unless change within us introduces new selective pressures that cause it to. Mutations have to be selectable in order to be preserved and it is an organisms environment that selects, not the organism itself. Quite simply, HIV hasn't changed because we haven't. We remain a good "fit" for it. Coelacanths have not changed for millions of years for the same reason. Evolution is a strategy that enables organisms to survive change within the environment. If there is no change within the environment then change will not occur in its inhabitants. Things don't exist to evolve, they evolve to exist.

Behe is obviously clueless about evolution, but it doesn't matter in the least to him or the Discovery Institute as their interest has never been the advancement of science. The real purpose of this book is made apparent in its final chapter and is axiomatically encapsulated by the following quote:

"Although some people value science chiefly for the control it affords us over nature or the technological benefits it brings, that's not its primary mission. The purpose of science is simply to understand the universe we live in, for its own sake. If that understanding leads to practical benefits, great. If not, that's okay, too. Science is an intellectual adventure, not a business trip. If at the end of the scientific day we simply know more about the world than at the beginning, our chief goal has been met."

What this says loud and clear is that ID is useless as far as science goes. This grim reality is not lost on Behe. Since its inception, ID's only real purpose has been to suppress scientific exploration and protect the myths of Christianity from the light of reason, but it has failed miserably in this regard. The gang over at the DI is getting desperate and it is starting to show. Only desperation can fully explain Behe`s now more outspoken and explicit support of common descent. ID has come apart at the seams and this terribly wayward book is Behe's and the DI's desperate attempt at damage control. They wish to clear the way for the assimilation of religious myths into the corpus of current scientific knowledge, but our thirst for truth and real knowledge will never let that happen. ID is stillborn. I'm curious to see what they will come up with next.

The title says it all, particularly the part after the colon: "The Search for the Limits of Darwinism." Hmmm, Michael Behe is searching for the limits of Darwinism. Fine, but what is Darwinism? The word is seldom if ever used in science, and it certainly isn't a synonym for the theory of evolution, which has been confirmed in many ways by many people since Darwin's time. Everyone who knows anything about science knows this, and that includes Behe.

Behe also knows that the word "Darwinism" is used pretty much exclusively by creationists, and pretty much always as a way of denying certain facts about evolutionary biology. Search the internet for "Darwinism", and you'll find the following nuggets in the top 20 hits:

-a page called "The Death of Darwinism" claims that, "[paleontologists] never find the transitional forms which Darwin's theory demands."

-a page called "Darwinism Refuted" claims that, "The second law of thermodynamics constitutes an insurmountable obstacle for the scenario
of evolution."

-something called "Darwinism Watch" asserts that, "[Darwinism] insists that merely by the divine power of chance, unconscious atoms developed over eons into seeing, hearing, conscious human beings."

I like that last one -- Darwinism is about unconscious atoms(?). Point is, these people are about as confused as one can get about evolutionary biology. They have an emotional need to believe in the supernatural, and consequently they're easily manipulated into believing in things that are far less plausible than evolution. Apparently the people doing the manipulating have discovered that the word "Darwinism" is a handy way of summarizing what bothers all these hapless people. In short the definition of "Darwinism" appears to be something like, "creationist confusion about science."

Thus translated, Behe's title is accurate and informative: "The Search for the Limits of Creationist Confusion about Science." Behe has arguably been exploring this limit for the better part of a decade. A recent breakthrough was his testimony in Dover, in which he admitted under oath that:

1) There are no peer-reviewed articles that support Intelligent Design, either by experiment or calculation.
2) He didn't feel it was worth his time to do experiments that test specific hypotheses related to Intelligent Design.
3) He didn't feel that he had to read much of the primary literature on the biological systems that he claimed were inconsistent with evolution.

I won't even get into the astrology thing.

At this point he was at least 10 years into his career as the poster boy for the promotion of Intelligent Design as science.

You might think that such a meltdown would spell trouble for the Intelligent Design movement, but Behe had made an important discovery: creationist credulity is essentially limitless. In fact, the Intelligent Design circus just rolled right along. Creationists everywhere took little notice of Behe's implosion, and the Discovery Institute continued with business as usual, deploying their "swift-boat" marketing team to attack the Dover judge in the media (as if Judge Jones had forced Behe to make a fool of himself).

Here's a summary of Behe's latest, using more words than it merits: Behe has constructed a model of evolution. It doesn't work. Rather than concluding that there is something wrong with his model, he concludes that there is something wrong with evolution.

You have to understand that outside of Creationist-world, a non-working model is not terribly useful. The most one can do with such a model is to design some experiments that might shed light on where it went wrong. Or perhaps re-reading the primary literature would reveal a faulty assumption (Behe's model has many, as other reviewers have documented). But Behe is unwilling to consider the possibility that he's wrong, so instead he has chosen to claim in a pop-science book that he has formulated "an overarching theory of the universe." Sure. Either that or he has a bug in his computer program. Until someone in the Intelligent Design movement does some actual science, how would anyone ever know?

What is the statistical possibility that random mutation is the driving mechanism for ALL the changes visible in life's history?

Based on malaria's mutation rates and failures in defeating sickle cell and cocktail drugs, Behe says that random mutation IN GENERAL cannot do more than make tiny, almost entropic changes in organisms.

A lot of one star reviews get upset at this correlation. How can you say that malaria's mutation rates and changes can be correlated with the actions of ALL genes in existence? Behe's general response is this: show me how, with random mutation and natural selection, complex objects like cilia are built.

Behe says that if a simple thing like malaria can't jump over a two point mutation hurdle, random mutation is not the model that builds complex organisms. At best, it's entropy that gets exploited in certain situations.


Dawkins will argue that 5% of an eye is better than 1% of an eye. Half a fin is better than no fin, and half a giraffe's neck is better than no giraffe's neck, etc. When there is sudden drought, does a 5% longer neck really help you survive? Evolution is full of adaptations that always 'fit' in 20/20 hindsight. Yet random mutation / natural selection offers no testable hypothesis or predictions, especially with layers of complexity found in organisms. It is hard to call evolution's stated mechanism a theory when it operates like a story.

Other one star reviews are upset at Behe's intelligent design proposal, which really does not belong in this book. In Behe's explanation, everything from the moon's position to electron properties are predetermined for life to happen. This ruinous second half reads like a scientist plagiarizing The Book of Genesis....

Nonetheless, the book is a fast and provocative read. He is a good author and I hope he keeps sticking pins into the random mutation story.

Behe is smart, there is not doubt about that. He is a good writer and a good storyteller. However, I do not reccomend this book to anyone who does not have a working knowledge of molecular/cell biology and evolutionary biology - natural history and such. The reason for this is because Behe has different examples (including the horrid mousetrap) that seem to support his theories. If you are not versed in Biology, unfortunately this book will seem like trudging through jargon, not feeling convinced, yet not understanding how he makes the claims that he dooes.

As a Biologist, let me give you an example of how he uses creative language to appear to make sense. In response to this books review in the Journal "Science" where the author pointed out some studies that illustrated a double mutation to cause differentiation in species. One of Behe's main claims is that the phenomenon of mutation does not fit in with Darwiniam evolutionary theory because generally speaking, any small mutation (be it of just one base pair in the DNA sequence) renders the gene product pretty much useless. The problem with this view is that even though a mutation in DNA usually causes a bad affect, there are small chances that a change will cause beneficial changes. So going back to the studies quoted in a review of Behe's book by "Science", these were plant studies that demonstrated that two small changes (double mutation) in a plants' DNA caused differentiation into another species. Behe blows this off on a recent CSPAN interview, saying that these are two different phyla (word for a grouping of plants above genus and species)and none of this necessarily means that mutation causes or lends to evolution in general. WHat does that mean?? Lets ignore data that is not convenient to my theories...!

Honestly, what I really think of Behe is that he doesn't really believe what he is selling. However, if you appear to be respectable (He is a PhD teaching at Lehigh) and can talk well, appear to be educating the masses on Biochemistry, then you can gain a lot of immediate attention being one of the very few who want to submit some psuedo-scientific data for creationism. And nothing will get you more attention in the Biology community than attacking Darwin. All he is doing is moving some paper and making himself some money.

Behe accepts common descent, and therefore by definition evolution. He claims "Darwinian" micro-evolution, but "designed" macro-evolution. He thus argues not for an edge to evolution, but for an edge to natural selection, beyond which we find the intelligent designer. (Though Behe coyly says that the conclusion is really up to the reader; he's only presenting scientific facts.) For reasons not readily apparent to me, he places the boundary or edge somewhere between Orders and Genera. Apparently Behe doesn't realize the ancestors of today's primates and petunias were once in the same Genus, if you go back far enough.

There's much to criticize, so I'll just pick three items.

Behe claims to prove mathematically that the chance of 3 beneficial genetic mutations occuring simultaneously is statistically virtually zero, throughout all the existence of life on earth. Assume that's true, although Behe ignores the good possibility of higher mutation rates under earth's earlier, more radiation-penetrable atmosphere. Still, he hasn't proven that simultaneous, rather than sequential, mutations are necessary to natural selection. (Obviously, the genetic modifications that produced a light-sensitive cell, a lens, an iris, and eyelids didn't occur at once.) However, he states that malaria bacteria resistant to chloroquine may have as many as 8 genetic mutations, developed through random mutation and natural selection. Albeit he claims 2 of the mutations as "primary", yet he says the others "apparently 'compensate' for side-effects" of the primary mutations. So actually Behe cites a case of 8 individual self-reinforcing genetic mutations arising, apparently sequentially. And, these obviously contradictory items occur within 15 pages of each other!

Behe claims that natural selection is always detructive, rather than constructive - it can't add anything "new". In addition to basing this on the "insufficient mutation rate/insufficient chance of accumulation of beneficial mutations" argument above, which Behe himself naively contradicts, he seems to be working with some rather Platonic concept of an abstract "ideal" fitness outside of environment conditions. So Behe seems to suggest that the sickle-cell trait is destructive of the organism's "ideal" fitness. Rather, in a tropic environment, it is constructive precisely because on average you are more likely to live to reproduce if you have the trait.

Irreducable complexity: Since the old favorite the eye has been shown to fail this argument, through the presence of numerous useable forms simpler than the complex human eye, the new candidate Behe puts forward is bacterial cilia. Apparently Behe would ask us to stop trying to seek how this could have evolved naturally, turn from biology to mysticism and theology, and just bow our heads. No doubt if Behe had lived 500 years ago, he'd tell us not to worry what the stars are made of - god put them there, and we'll never know.

Buy this to read the best the ID crowd can produce, and buy Dawkin's Climbing Mount Improbable for your ID-inclined friends.