DARWIN’S BLACK BOX: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

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Virtually all serious scientists accept the truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Even as the fight for its acceptance has been a long and difficult one, after a century of struggle a few of the cognoscenti the battle is over. Biologists are now confident that their remaining questions, such as how life on Earth began, or how the Cambrian explosion could have produced such a lot of new species in such a short time, will be found to have Darwinian answers. They, like most of the rest of us, accept Darwin’s theory to be true.

But will have to we? What would happen if we found something that radically challenged the now-accepted wisdom? In Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe argues that evidence of evolution’s limits has been right under our noses — but it is so small that we have only recently been able to see it. The field of biochemistry, begun when Watson and Crick discovered the double-helical shape of DNA, has unlocked the secrets of the cell. There, biochemists have rapidly discovered a world of Lilliputian complexity. As Behe engagingly demonstrates, the use of the examples of vision, bloodclotting, cellular transport, and more, the biochemical world comprises an arsenal of chemical machines, made up of finely calibrated, interdependent parts. For Darwinian evolution to be true, there will have to have been a series of mutations, each of which produced its own working machine, that led to the complexity we will be able to now see. The more complex and interdependent each machine’s parts are shown to be, the harder it is to envision Darwin’s gradualistic paths, Behe surveys the professional science literature and shows that it is completely silent on the subject, stymied by the elegance of the foundation of life. Could it be that there is some greater force at work?

Michael Behe is not a creationist. He believes in the scientific method, and he does not look to religious dogma for answers to these questions. But he argues persuasively that biochemical machines will have to have been designed — either by God, or by some other higher intelligence. For decades science has been frustrated, trying to reconcile the astonishing discoveries of modern biochemistry to a nineteenth-century theory that cannot accommodate them. With the publication of Darwin’s Black Box, it is time for scientists to allow themselves to imagine exciting new possibilities, and for the rest of us to watch closely.


Michael J. Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, presents here a scientific argument for the existence of God. Examining the evolutionary theory of the origins of life, he can go part of the way with Darwin–he accepts the idea that species have been differentiated by the mechanism of natural selection from a common ancestor. But he thinks that the essential randomness of this process can provide an explanation for evolutionary development only at the macro level, not at the micro level of his expertise. Within the biochemistry of living cells, he argues, life is “irreducibly complex.” This is the last black box to be opened, the end of the road for science. Faced with complexity at this level, Behe suggests that it can only be the product of “intelligent design.”

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