THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION
The Search for the Limits of Darwinism
By Michael J. Behe
Free Press, 320 pages, $33.99
More Arts Stories
In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, biblical scholar John Whitcomb and hydraulic engineer Henry Morris published a book, Genesis Flood, arguing for a "young Earth" history of the origins of the world. According to the best of modern science, they claimed, everything happened exactly as described in the early chapters of Genesis - six literal days of creation, humans last, worldwide deluge.
Perhaps owing to the tensions of the time, their "premillennial dispensationalism" - periods of quiet followed by great upheavals, the first being Noah's Flood, the final one being around the corner at Armageddon - struck a note with many of their fellow Americans. So-called Scientific Creationism was up and running.
It stumbled rather badly in Arkansas in 1981, when a federal judge ruled that in no sense is it real science. It is fundamentalist religion, tarted up to look like science, intended to get around the U.S. constitutional separation of church and state. Hence, it could not legitimately be taught as biology in state-supported schools.
That seemed to be the end of things, but like one of those monsters in a 1950s B-movie, it was not long before Scientific Creationism mutated into another more deadly form, so-called Intelligent Design Theory (IDT). The nutty views about Genesis are now dropped - at least, they are kept firmly out of view - and it is simply argued that aspects of the organic world just could not have come about by natural causes. Hence, one must invoke a designing intelligence, a.k.a. God.
IDT has been remarkably successful. George W. Bush is one among many who have stated flatly that it should be taught in schools alongside evolutionary biology. Although it is illegal to do so - another court case in Dover, Penn., in 2005 ruled that it, too, violates the separation of church and state - estimates are that at least 20 per cent of American schools already teach it. One suspects that it is not entirely unknown in biology classes north of the border, either.
One book, above all, counts for this success. Darwin's Black Box, published in 1996 and written by Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, makes the case for IDT in the most user-friendly manner possible. True, Behe does say some pretty silly things, notably that he is proposing a scientific revolution on a par with that of Copernicus.
Generally, however, he is a warm and friendly biology professor - I am sure he gets fantastic teaching ratings - who explains technical details of microbiology with the use of simple but persuasive analogies. Supposedly, some aspects of the organic world, for instance the process by which the blood clots are so design-like - what Behe calls "irreducibly complex" - that a law-bound process of evolution could never have produced them. Hence, we must appeal to interventions from without.
For 10 years, regular biologists have been taking Behe's claims apart. Again and again, it has been argued with massive detail that Behe's supposed examples of irreducible complexity are nothing like as irreducible as he claims. Something like blood clotting, for instance, can be explained as the result of very ordinary evolutionary processes.
Now Behe responds to his critics in The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Fighting all the way, he argues that IDT is untouched by the critics and that naturalistic processes cannot explain the facts of living organisms, particularly living organisms at their micro-levels.
Although I am a hard-line Darwinian evolutionist and loathe and detest IDT, I have a grudging admiration for Darwin's Black Box. It's wrong through and through, but has a certain style - it is a brilliantly written piece of advocacy, powerful because (generally) it seems so modest.
I am afraid, though, that The Edge of Evolution is a bit of a sad sack. Nothing very much new, old arguments repeated, opposition ignored or dismissed without argument. What does surprise me is how emphatic Behe now is in putting a distance between himself and the older Creationists. For a start, he stresses his commitment to evolution. He thinks the world of life is as old as is claimed by any more conventional biologist. He also wants to give natural processes of change a role in life's history. For instance, the genetic mechanisms that led to the production of anti-freeze in fish that live in Arctic conditions are explicitly acknowledged to be those of random mutation sifted through the processes of natural selection, the survival of the fittest.
Overall, however, we are still where we were with Darwin's Black Box. The micro-world is too complex to be a product of nature. Something - or rather, Some Thing - else was needed. I presume the converted will like this book, although I do wonder about the extreme biblical literalists. These latter do not think IDT goes anywhere like far enough, but have agreed for the moment to let the IDT supporters do the blocking. When the battle has been won against evolution will be time enough to ask for a lot more.
Behe does seem to be making it more and more difficult for an extreme literalist to be even lukewarmly for IDT, something that apparently takes on old Earth, evolution, even some natural selection.
I know my fellow evolutionists will like the book, because now they have the excuse to write yet more articles against IDT. For myself, with so many important issues waiting for attention in our society, I am just a bit depressed that anyone would think that something like IDT is worth pushing or that it gains so much attention others have to spend time refuting it.
Certainly, if I were a Christian, I would be terrified of it. If God really does have to get involved in His creation every time something complex needs producing, why does He not get involved in His creation whenever something simple but awful needs avoiding? Many genetic diseases are the product of just one molecule gone wrong. Surely an all-powerful, all-loving God could have taken five minutes off from creating the irreducibly complex to tweak those rogue molecules back into line?
If you have not read Darwin's Black Box, then read it to find out what the controversy is all about. If you have read Darwin's Black Box, then don't bother to read The Edge of Evolution. Same old stuff, without the style of the first book.
Michael Ruse teaches philosophy at Florida State University. Friends and enemies agree that he is the living refutation of Intelligent Design.
7