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Michael J. Behe (born January 18th, 1952) is an American biochemist and intelligent design advocate. Behe is professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He is noted for advocating the idea that life is too complex at the biochemical level to have evolved, which he has termed irreducible complexity.
Behe's claims about the irreducible complexity of key cellular structures are strongly contested by the scientific community, including the Department of Biological Sciences at his own Lehigh University. Likewise, his claims about intelligent design have been characterized by his adversaries as pseudoscience.
Academics
Behe graduated from Drexel University in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. He did his graduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell disease. From 1978 to 1982, he did postdoctoral work on DNA structure at the National Institutes of Health. From 1982 to 1985, he was assistant professor of chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he met his wife. In 1985 he moved to Lehigh University and is currently a Professor of Biochemistry.
Controversy: irreducible complexity & intelligent design
Behe once fully accepted the scientific theory of evolution. After reading Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, by Michael Denton, he came to question evolution. Later, Behe came to believe that there was evidence, at a biochemical level, that there were systems that were "irreducibly complex". These were systems that he thought could not, even in principle, have evolved by natural selection, and thus must have been created by an "intelligent designer," which he believed to be the only possible alternative explanation for such complex structures.
In 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision in the U.S. Supreme Court barred the teaching of Scientific Creationism from public schools. The books of lawyer Phillip E. Johnson on intelligent design, which strayed away from direct claims about a ] and stuck to criticisms of evolutionary theory and purported biased materialist science, provided such a model. New organizations devoted to the study of intelligent design sprung up, among them the Discovery Institute. In 1996 Behe became a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (later renamed the Center for Science and Culture) the then newly-formed institution to promote intelligent design.
By this time, Behe had published his ideas on irreducible complexity in a book called Darwin's Black Box, which was a public and critical success. The response from the scientific community was considerably harsher. Many Scientists argued that Behe's arguments and examples were based on nothing more than a refined form of personal incredulity, rather than any demonstration of the actual impossibility of explanation by natural processes. Furthermore, they asserted that he deliberately aimed the publication of this book at the general public in order to gain maximum publicity while avoiding any peer-reviews from fellow scientists or performing new research to support his claims.
Nevertheless, Behe's purportedly more secular arguments and credentials as a published biochemist gave the intelligent design movement its first major mainstream proponent. Behe's scrupulous refusal to identify the nature of any proposed intelligent designer "infuriated" opponents (who saw it as a move to avoid any possibility of testing the positive claims of ID) but allowed him and the intelligent design movement to distance themselves from some of the more overtly religiously motivated critics of evolution.
Unlike many in the intelligent design movement, Behe seems to accept the common descent of species, including the common ancestry of humans and other apes. He also accepts the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and the Universe.
He published a paper, together with David Snoke, in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Protein Science , which he claims supports the idea, based on the calculation of the probability of mutations required for evolution to succeed. However, it does not mention intelligent design nor irreducible complexity, which were removed, according to Behe, at the behest of the reviewers.
Many scientists were again highly critical of the claims made about the research, pointing out that it not only had shown that a supposedly Irreducibly Complex structure could evolve, but that it could do so within a reasonable time even subject to unrealistically harsh restrictions. They also objected to it being claimed as published evidence for design given that it offered no design theory or attempt to model the design process, and also failed to offer an alternative to evolution .
In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the first direct challenge brought in United States federal courts to an attempt to mandate the teaching of intelligent design on First Amendment grounds, Behe was called as a primary witness for the defense, and asked to support the idea that intelligent design was legitimate science. Behe's critics have pointed to a number of key exchanges that they say further undermine his claims about irreducible complexity and intelligent design. Under cross examination, Behe conceded that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred". Under oath, Behe admitted that his simulation modelling of evolution with Snoke had in fact shown that complex biochemical systems requiring multiple interacting parts for the system to function and requiring multiple, consecutive and unpreserved mutations to be fixed in a population could evolve within 20,000 years, even if the parameters of the simulation were rigged to make that outcome as unlikely as possible. Behe's testimony was cited several times in the final ruling.
Many of Behe's challenges to evolution have been addressed by biologist Kenneth Miller in his book, Finding Darwin's God
Behe has written editorial features in the Boston Review, American Spectator, and New York Times.
Books
- Darwin's Black Box ISBN 0684834936
- Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute) ISBN 0898708095
Video
- Intelligent Design: From the Big Bang to Irreducible Complexity
- Unlocking the Mystery of Life
- Irreducible Complexity: The Biochemical Challenge to Darwinian Theory
- Where Does the Evidence Lead?
References
- Unlocking the Mystery of Life (Video). USA. 2003.
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External links
General Discussion
Pro-intelligent design
Pro-Evolution
- Irreducible Complexity and Michael Behe on intelligent design -- part of the talk.origins archive.
- Irreducible Complexity Demystified
- Behe's Empty Box, on Richard Dawkins academic website
Debates and Talks
Video Reviews
- Unlocking the Mystery of Life the flagellar motor video