Michael Behe

Michael J. Behe is an American biochemist and intelligent design advocate.

Unsourced

• A good example from the biological world of complex changes appearing to be simple is the belief in spontaneous generation.

• A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed.

• Although Darwin was able to persuade much of the world that a modern eye could be produced gradually from a much simpler structure, he did not even attempt to explain how the simple light sensitive spot that was his starting point actually worked.

• An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.

• Biology has progressed tremendously due to the model that Darwin put forth. But the black boxes Darwin accepted are now being opened, and our view of the world is again being shaken.

• But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

• By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

• In concluding, it is important to realize that we are not inferring design from what we do not know, but from what we do know.

• In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.

• In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines.

• In order to say that some function is understood, every relevant step in the process must be elucidated.

• It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

• Now, it appears to be a characteristic of the human mind that when it is unconstrained by knowledge of the mechanisms of a process, then it seems easy to imagine simple steps leading from non-function to function.

• Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.

• Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

• Somehow, for Darwinian evolution to be believable, the difficulty that the public had in envisioning the gradual formation of complex organs had to be removed.

• The conclusion of design flows naturally from the data; we should not shrink from it; we should embrace it and build on it.

• The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.

• The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.

• We are not inferring design to account for a black box, but to account for an open box.

es:Michael Behe
Category:Americans
Category:Authors
Category:Biochemists
Category:Living people