Michael Behe's third book

I'm looking forward to Michael Behe's third book, which is due to be published in February. As most of you probably know, Michael Behe is a biochemist and a former professor at Lehigh University in Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA. He's also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture—the most prominent organization pushing Intelligent Design Creationism.

This will be Behe's third book. The first one was Darwin's Black Box (1996) where he argued against evolution by suggesting that some cellular complexes (e.g. bacterial flagella) are irreducibly complex and could not possibly have evolved by natural means. His second book was The Edge of Evolution (2007) where the theme was that there are limits to evolution preventing it from accomplishing significant beneficial changes.

I haven't read his third book but it looks like it will continue the pattern of trying to show that evolution is flawed rather than trying to show evidence of intelligent design. David Klinhoffer has posted a quotation from the new book indicating that the main approach is to argue that evolution can break things but not construct things [For #GivingTuesday, Help Michael Behe Demonstrate that Darwin Devolves].

This book…concentrates on completely unexpected, devastating new problems that could only have come to light after major recent advances in technical methods for probing the molecular level of life. With surpassing irony it turns out that, as with the polar bear, Darwinian evolution proceeds mainly by damaging or breaking genes, which, counter-intuitively, sometimes helps survival. In other words, the mechanism is powerfully de-volutionary.

This is standard propaganda for the Discovery Institute whenever a new book is about to be published. We are subjected to months of promotion including dire warnings about the imminent collapse of evolution because some ID intellectual has finally come up with an irrefutable argument that the scientific community can't ignore [Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves Topples Foundational Claim of Evolutionary Theory]. None of us can respond because we haven' read the book but when we suggest, based on our knowledge of chicken little and the boy who cried wolf, that there's no reason to fear the collapse of science then we are accused of dishonesty for not reading the book! [Evolutionist Attacks Behe Book’s Title]

Behe is one of the few ID proponents worth engaging because his arguments are much better than those of his colleagues at the Discovery Institute. Behe accepts common descent and limited examples of evolution and he rejects Young Earth Creationism.

You might imagine that Behe would take on his YEC colleagues as fiercely as he fights evolutionary biologists, but he doesn't. I find it very strange that ID proponents who still believe in a young Earth are fans of Michael Behe but I suppose they are happy because Behe is attacking evolution and as long as he keeps the focus on attacking a common enemy they are happy.¹

Those of you who read the first two books will recall that they were also about "devastating problems" with evolution that only came to light with new research revealed in 1996 and 2007. For some strange reason the textbooks have not been re-written and the churches have not filled up with new converts. What happened?

Refuting his first book was pretty straightforward because Behe based his argument on his inability to imagine how an irreducibly complex system could have evolved by natural means. All we had to do was show that irreducibly complex systems could evolve without the help of a designer and this turned out to be relatively easy.²

Refuting his second book was much harder—not because he was making a valid scientific argument but because showing where he goes wrong requires a fairly deep understanding of modern evolution. Behe was arguing that many presumed examples of evolution required three or more mutations in order to produce a beneficial effect. He claims that in many cases none of the individual steps are beneficial and some of them might even be detrimental. Thus, three mutations have to occur simultaneously and that's not possible—it's beyond the edge of evolution.

Behe would be correct if the only way to fix mutations was by positive natural selection. That's the old-fashioned, adaptationist view of evolution from the 1960s and it's the view that dominates the thinking of ID proponents. But with the development of Neutral Theory and it's off-shoot, Nearly-Neutral Theory, we now know that neutral and detrimental alleles can be maintained in a population for a long time because random genetic drift is often as potent a mechanism as natural selection.³

Thus, it's relatively simple to imagine how a new system requiring several mutations can evolve under modern evolutionary theory and this extends the edge of evolution far beyond the limits postulated by Michael Behe.⁴ In fact, it's easy to show that this is exactly how Behe's favorite example, chloroquine resistance to malaria, evolved. But, while such ideas are easy for most of us, they are still very difficult for most creationists, including Behe. You can see for yourself how he resists any explanation involving random genetic drift [Revisiting Michael Behe's challenge and revealing a closed mind].

It's kinda cute to see that the Discovery Institute is still under the illusion that they can discredit evolution and convince the world that a creator god exists. It's been more than 20 years since Intelligent Design became a popular creationist idea and the predictions from back then were that by now we would all be creationists. Instead, evolution is as strong as ever and people all over the world are abandoning religion.

I'm 100% certain that I can refute Behe's latest claim because I've seen it all before. Nevertheless, I will wait until I've read the book so the creationists can enjoy their yearly round of gloating and premature celebration. It's just about the only thing they have going for them these days.

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1. Things can go very badly for any creationist who disagrees with their fellow creationist. Look what happened to Sal Cordova [What would happen if Intelligent Design Creationists understood evolution?]

2. [The meaning of "irreducible complexity"] [Blown Out of the Water]

3. see [Evolutionary biochemistry and the importance of random genetic drift] [Learning about modern evolutionary theory: the drift-barrier hypothesis]

4. [Understanding Michael Behe's edge of evolution] [Understanding Mutation Rates and Evolution] [Historical evolution is determined by chance events]