Earlier this August marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of Michael Behe’s intelligent design classic, Darwin’s Black Box. It created a sensation at the time, selling hundreds of thousands of copies (huge for popular science books), and also eliciting widespread criticism from Darwinian naturalists, who did their best to pretend that there was nothing to see here—move on.
And yet, Behe and his book struck a nerve. Over time, many materialistic biologists have taken the firm policy not to engage with his challenge to Darwinian evolution. Ignore it. If asked, act as though it has long been discredited. If pressed, suggest that the person asking the questions is a creationist and fundamentalist. And if that doesn’t work, walk away.
One group of Darwinian naturalists, however, that has not been able to walk away is Mike’s fellow biologists on the faculty at Lehigh University. Here is Mike, a full professor teaching without hindrance and doing his work to advance intelligent design. But silence from fellow biology faculty would here be interpreted as complicity with intelligent design by the wider biological world. And so, to this day you will find the following disclaimer about intelligent design—and specifically mentioning Mike—on the Lehigh University biology website:
The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.
The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.” While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.
Frankly, the embarrassment here is not that Lehigh continues to employ Mike but in the disclaimer itself—genuflecting to Darwin, like offering incense to Caesar, being part of what it means to be a biologist in good standing.
When I was on the faculty of Baylor, my presence there inspired similar reactions. Thus, seven scientists at the school addressed a letter to the US Congress declaring intelligent design not to be science, which was read into the Congressional Record. Today, Baylor’s biology department issues a statement pro evolution, but it is careful to avoid reference to intelligent design or to any individual. The list of readings it uses to justify this statement, in light Baylor’s claim to be a Christian university, is instructive (it’s all theistic and non-theistic evolution).
I first got to know Mike at a 1992 SMU symposium that placed Darwinists and design theorists in dialogue (out-of-print proceedings here, but a new edition is coming out with Inkwell soon). At that symposium, I also got to meet for the first time Steve Meyer and Phil Johnson. Already at that symposium, Mike addressed the sorts of biochemical criticisms of Darwinism for which he would become famous. His key talk at that symposium was titled “Experimental Support for Regarding Functional Classes of Proteins to Be Highly Isolated from Each Other.”
By 2004, Douglas Axe would publish the definitive empirical study, in the Journal of Molecular Biology, on protein isolation. Presently, I’m aware of one Discovery Institute researcher who is publishing on the underlying mathematics of this isolatedness of proteins in amino-acid sequence space (I’m keeping his identity confidential to shield him from reprisals). Just to be clear, if proteins are highly isolated, it makes it that much harder to evolve among them because protein evolution, on Darwinian principles, must traverse continuous paths and thus cannot simply materialize from one place in the space to another. The more isolation, the harder it is to form such continuous paths.
Mike’s key concept of irreducible complexity and its application to molecular machines would come a year later, at least that’s how I remember it. Conferences and meetings of intelligent design’s original A-team (Phil Johnson, Mike Behe, Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer, Paul Nelson, Doug Axe, and myself) ramped up in 1993 and the following years.
I recall at least two meetings with Mike in 1993, one at a private meeting in Pajaro Dunes, south of San Francisco, that June; and then a full-fledged American Scientific Affiliation conference later that summer at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). As I remember it, Mike was already making his irreducible complexity arguments in his talks at these events. I also remember stopping by at Mike’s dorm room at the SPU conference only to find that he was not taking part in the usual conference banter and diversions because he was working on a book—the book that became Darwin’s Black Box. I remember an intensity about Mike as he was writing the book—it was as though he was on a mission to get it out.
When the book did appear in August of 1996, I was already well aware of the key arguments, so it took me a bit to see just how big an impact it was going to have. Familiarity on my part in a sense lulled me to its wider impact. “Sure, Mike’s book destroys molecular Darwinism; I’ve known that for three years now.” I was already a convert, but I didn’t know how many converts his book might make. But as events unfolded, Darwin’s Black Box proved to be a big big deal.
Phil had rekindled well-informed criticism of Darwinism with his book Darwin on Trial (1991). But he was a law professor, not a biologist, and his focus was on the internal contradictions of Darwinism and how it required dubious philosophical presuppositions to keep it afloat. Earlier, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen had critiqued materialistic origin-of-life studies in The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984), but they had merely raised design/intelligence as a possible way to redress life’s information problem—they didn’t press the point too hard. The other key work in the lead-up to Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), had broached the discontinuity in living forms on which Mike Behe focused, but without the full concept of irreducible complexity.
Mike found that certain biochemical machines, such as the bacterial flagellum, had the property of irreducible complexity, which is to say, they consisted of multiple well-matched parts all of which were necessary for the primary function of the machine, and where the elimination of any part destroyed the function. Given that such systems existed in actual living cells, Mike asked how they could have evolved through a process of gradual molecular Darwinian evolution. All the parts were necessary, so how could they have come together gradually? If Darwin was right, there had to be a gradual molecular path to these systems. And yet, these systems seemed to defy the gradual evolution required of them.
Critics were swift to try to shut this argument down. Mike had claimed that there were no detailed Darwinian accounts of such systems. Ken Miller, the Brown University biologist, replied in Finding Darwin’s God that he could produce “four glittering examples” of Darwinian evolution producing irreducibly complex systems. Yet examination of these papers revealed that the systems Miller identified were not in fact irreducibly complex (see my response in No Free Lunch, p. 269).
But to really refute Mike, Miller then went further to claim that none of the biochemical systems Mike himself considered, such as the bacterial flagellum, was in fact irreducibly complex. Miller justified this outrageous claim by redefining irreducible complexity. Miller claimed they were not irreducibly complex because all these systems could lose parts and then still serve some other function (thus, by Miller’s redefinition, they were in fact reducibly complex). But that was, of course, Mike’s point—that these systems couldn’t lose parts and still perform their original function. I can, for instance, remove the spring, hammer, holding bar, and catch from a conventional mousetrap and then use the remaining wooden base as a doorstop. But what’s left won’t any longer catch mice.
Honest biologists, who nonetheless were not fans of Mike’s conclusions, admitted that he had offered a serious challenge to molecular evolution. James Shapiro, a molecular biologist at the University of Chicago, wrote: “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory explanation for such a vast subject—evolution—with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity” (National Review, 16 September 1996). A few years later cell biologist Franklin Harold wrote a book for Oxford University Press titled The Way of the Cell (2003). In virtually identical language, he noted: “There are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”
The challenge of irreducible complexity to the evolution of biochemical machines remains as disconcerting today (if anything, the challenge in the intervening years has become even more painful for Darwinists) as it did in the decade following the publication of Darwin’s Black Box. With the bacterial flagellum, the biochemical machine to get the most attention in Mike’s work, critics pointed to the type 3 secretory system (T3SS) as a system embedded in the bacterial flagellum that could perform its own function, and thus serve as a possible evolutionary precursor to the flagellum. But the flagellum consists of at least 10 more protein parts. So what was the path from the T3SS to the flagellum? How did those additional parts gradually get folded into an evolving T3SS to form the flagellum?
A little bit of autobiography may be illuminating at this juncture. When I saw such arguments from Darwinists for the evolution of the flagellum, I couldn’t at first believe that they took this approach to the evolution of such systems seriously. As a result, in some of my initial responses defending Mike’s book, I didn’t address the co-option argument to which Darwinists were, and always have been, committed in explaining away systems like the flagellum.
According to this co-option argument, systems like the flagellum can evolve from the T3SS by a kind of ratcheting effect in which structures and functions change step by small incremental evolutionary step. It would be like evolving kitchen appliances as follows: start with a toaster, add a part, and now you have a microwave oven; add another part, and now you have a regular oven; add another part, and now you have a dishwasher; add another part, and now you have a refrigerator; and so on.
I didn’t at first adequately address this co-option criticism of Behe because I couldn’t believe that anyone could take it seriously. But Darwinists did. Thus, they were not just saying that the T3SS is a precursor to the flagellum, but also that there is a whole series of gradual steps in which a new part gets added and the function changes, then another part gets added and the function changes again, and so on until evolution takes us to a full-fledged flagellum.
How implausible is that? The flagellum was considerably more complicated than the T3SS. So there had to be, on evolutionary grounds, a gradual set of intermediates between the two. Citing the T3SS as an evolutionary precursor of the flagellum struck me, to change the metaphor from kitchen appliances to motorcycles, like invoking a motor as a precursor to a motorcycle. A lot of intermediate steps, all functional, would be needed to gradually evolve one into the other, and yet none of these intermediate steps have ever been plausibly identified for irreducibly complex biochemical systems (or for human artifacts for that matter). With the T3SS evolving into the bacterial flagellum, no plausible path was identified when Behe published his book in 1996, and they remain as unidentified today as then.
Interestingly, the bacterial flagellum is a motility device for bacteria to propel them through their watery environments. It therefore makes sense to see flagella as existing since the dawn of bacteria. The T3SS, also known as an injectisome, on the other hand, serves as a poison delivery system for a bacterium to infect and injure an animal host (Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium uses it). Animals have been around for a much shorter duration than bacteria in the standard chronology of life on earth. So, if anything, it makes sense to think that the T3SS didn’t evolve into the bacterial flagellum, but that the bacterial flagellum shed some protein parts to become a T3SS.
It’s always easier to remove things to get something functional than to add new things to something already functional to achieve a new function. The new things added require coordination with the old. Dropping things from the old to form a new simpler system is not so sensitive to this coordination problem. This idea of evolution proceeding from complexity to simplicity became a theme in Mike’s subsequent thought and research, such as in Darwin Devolves (2019) There Mike argued that the primary trajectory of Darwinian evolution has been not from simplicity to complexity, but rather from complexity via evolutionary pruning to simplicity.
It’s been an honor to have been with Mike from the start of his work on irreducible complexity in advancing intelligent design and refuting Darwinism. His is a seminal contribution to biology notwithstanding the continued opposition to his views and argument from Darwinian naturalists. Despite, and in part because of, that opposition, his ideas about irreducible complexity have gained widespread attention. Moreover, he has over the years ably defended his ideas, notably in A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics (2020), a book of over 500 pages that cogently answers all his critics both with grace and steel.
Congratulations Mike on keeping the faith and a job well done!
Irreducible complexity and Behe's work became central in my conversion from evolutionist to ID-man. Having rebuilt and modified engines for my wife's racing car, I immediately understood the concept of IC whcih in the world of engineering is the bleed'n obvious. Only in a mind game can evolution work, - in the real world it´s pure insanity to assume you can build complex functional systems gradually. But Darwin's moronic theory is still mainstream and it's frustrating to fight it.
Hi Dr. Dembski. I made this comment in another thread a couple days ago, but I think it's more apt for this one, so I'll copy it here:
One thing I've come to notice is that not only have Darwinists/materialists never given a coherent answer to the challenge of irreducible complexity, they've never given an answer that even really *addresses* the actual issue at hand. Their responses are always a change of subject that address a different issue.
All Darwinist answers to irreducibly complex systems boil down to the claim that the system and/or its parts had precursors that were performing different functions or no function, and got coopted somehow into the new system.
But that's not an explanation, it's just a truism. It goes without saying that if a given system with a given function is composed of multiple parts that have to all be present and working together in the right way to play their roles to realize that function, then prior to that system's existence any precursors to the system or its parts couldn't have been performing that same function, and so would've had to be performing a different function if any.
To the extent that such cooption/exaptation can be considered an answer to a challenge, it's an answer to "It's impossible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence." But that's not the challenge that irreducible complexity poses. Obviously it's possible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence, or else they wouldn't exist. Nobody disputes that. The problem that irreducible complexity poses is that it's not possible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence *unintentionally*, and that's the part that Darwinists never address, or really even try to.
You can see that in, for instance, Ken Miller's "reverse mousetrap" illustration, where he has a stripped-down mousetrap serving as a tie clip. Of course, that's a result of him intentionally thinking "What could I possibly use a stripped-down mousetrap for?" until he came up with something. In reality a stripped-down mousetrap is wildly impractical as a tie clip, and more to the point, no normally-occurring tie clip would be useful as a mousetrap just by adding some parts to it, much less by *accidentally* adding some parts to it, precisely because it wasn't made for that.
Now, it is true that the evolution of human technology often works by a "cooption" of sorts. For instance, after the rotary motor was invented, it was eventually coopted and modified to make automobiles. But this is a *conceptual* evolution. It was the *idea* of a rotary motor that was coopted to make the automobile. A human being saw some rotary motors and thought "I could use something conceptually similar to that, appropriately modified and combined with wheels and other parts, to build a convenient self-propelled transportation device that could replace horse and buggies."
The actual original rotary motor invented by humans would've been quite useless in an automobile, and no amount of modification would've changed that enough to make it cooptable for that purpose. Now, it is true that nowadays we do have off-the-shelf parts (screws, nails, sheet metal in standardized sizes, various types of motors, etc) that are reusable in a variety of applications as they are, but that too is a result of *conceptual* evolution. In fact, these are an example of modular design, an especially forward-thinking type of conceptual thought that designs components specifically to be physically useful in a wide variety of *future* applications. Of course, actually using them in any such application requires further conceptual cooption along with the physical cooption.
Naturalistic evolution could never in principle work like that, because naturalistic "evolution" is supposed to be nothing more than the acting out of blind and mechanistic causes, and blind and mechanistic causes by definition do not have concepts (that's what "blind" and "mechanistic" mean).
Darwinists argue this way because, as I've pointed out before, all Darwinian explanation implicitly depends on reifying "natural selection" or "evolution" as a literal intelligent agent with a mind, purposes, and goals. Every Darwinian explanation falls apart when you take away that assumption, and in fact their entire mode of explanation is rendered incoherent if "natural selection" is consistently taken to be the mindless physical processes they claim it is rather than the intelligent designer their explanations actually invoke it as. One might say that they are ID theorists in cheap tuxedos.
As such, when challenged to explain something like irreducible complexity, they don't really fully comprehend that their challenge is to explain it in purely blind and naturalistic terms completely devoid of mind with all that entails. They subconsciously swap it out for the much less obviously impossible challenge of answering how "natural selection" conceived as an intelligent agent with lots of time on his hands could go about it.
The reason they do this is the same reason why if I ask you to visualize a square circle, you will necessarily visualize *either* a square *or* a circle instead: Their position is actually incoherent, and when the mind tries to visualize or conceive of something incoherent, it must by necessity swap it out for something coherent that can actually be conceived. This process that can cause a philosophically unreflective person to simply conflate the incoherent idea they were trying to conceive with the coherent idea they conceived in its place instead of realizing that it's incoherent.