Read Darwin Devolves The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution Audible Audio Edition Michael J Behe Tim Andres Pabon HarperAudio Books
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The scientist who has been dubbed the "Father of Intelligent Design" and author of the groundbreaking book Darwin's Black Box contends that recent scientific discoveries further disprove Darwinism and strengthen the case for an intelligent creator.
In his controversial best-seller Darwin's Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe challenged Darwin's theory of evolution, arguing that science itself has proven that intelligent design is a better explanation for the origin of life. In Darwin Devolves, Behe advances his argument, presenting new research that offers a startling reconsideration of how Darwin's mechanism works, weakening the theory's validity even more.Â
A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution can help make something look and act differently. But evolution never creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually works by a process of devolution - damaging cells in DNA in order to create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot explain the creation of life itself. "A process that so easily tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will build complex, functional systems," he writes.
In addition to disputing the methodology of Darwinism and how it conflicts with the concept of creation, Behe reveals that what makes intelligent design unique - and right - is that it acknowledges causation. Evolution proposes that organisms living today are descended with modification from organisms that lived in the distant past. But intelligent design goes a step further, asking What caused such astounding changes to take place? What is the reason or mechanism for evolution? For Behe, this is what makes intelligent design so important.
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Read Darwin Devolves The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution Audible Audio Edition Michael J Behe Tim Andres Pabon HarperAudio Books
"Update Mar 2, 2019: See my update below, now that I’ve finished the book. (Summary: this is THE BOOK you must read, whether you are a staunch supporter/believer of any type of Darwinian evolution, or of intelligent design. Breath-taking, major issues that must be answered; a total game changer!)
Original review – Feb 26, 2019:
I got my copy this afternoon (I didn't realize Amazon shipped it on Saturday so it would arrive today - thank you, Amazon!).
I was glad to read in the Introduction about Michael Behe's personal path from a never-questioning believer in evolution to an insistent questioner who got mad once he finally realized that none of his professors had ever critiqued Darwin's theories. This turn-around came after he read Denton's "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" and began to realize there were serious problems with the theory, and so he began his current quest to research and study the data himself to see what the evidence actually shows.
Two of his comments (just from the Introduction) I found very insightful:
* He originally was led to believe in Darwin's theory not for strong evidence for it, but for sociological reasons: "that simply was the way educated people were expected to think these days."
* "When one starts to treat Darwinism as a hypothesis about the biochemical level of life rather than as an assumption, it takes about ten minutes to conclude it's radically inadequate."
This parallels what I've experienced. Now, I'm a software developer and entrepreneur, not a trained scientist. And I've had a lot of (mostly unwanted) litigation experience, where I've seen people make up arguments with next to no support, whose main objectives were to hurt me and my companies. And so I've learned to ask hard questions, to question assumptions, to uncover hidden objectives (which often have seemed to simply cover extreme or fatal weaknesses to arguments of the other side) to get to a proper understanding of what really happened. And so I appreciate that this is what Michael Behe is doing.
I know this book is going to cause major problems for him and his profession: as he further pulls back the curtain that has enabled his field to largely ignore key issues that are fatal to evolutionary theory, he will be slammed hard, called out for surrendering to pseudo science, effectively securing his position as possibly the worst menace to all of science as we know it today.
One last point (out of many!) from chapter 1 is what Behe calls "red flag number one" where researchers and/or reporters display "pretend (or feigned) knowledge" as they add gratuitous affirmations of evolutionary theory due to their biased pro-evolutionary assumptions.
He shows this clearly in his first example where he contrasts these two sentences: "Humans have evolved a sense of self that is unparalleled in its complexity" and "Humans have a sense of self that is unparalleled in its complexity". Behe then asks the question, "what information has been lost by deleting the word 'evolved'?" There were no studies done to demonstrate how evolutionary processes could produce a mind with a sense of self; the word "evolved" carries no information, but it's "just a science-y, content-free salute to the notion that everything about living beings ... simply must have come about by the ordinary evolutionary processes that biologists study." We see this in so many papers and articles, where writers "plant Darwin's flag everywhere" -- without valid scientific reason, and just based on unwarranted and untested assumptions. And when you remove the gratuitous "evolved" flags, the statements lose absolutely nothing and yet then become more honest and accurate.
OK, 'nuff said... for now.
Awesome book, hard to put down, perhaps impossible for confirmed evolutionists to handle, but for those open to sincere questioning and willing to follow the evidence where it leads, I highly recommend it.
Update: Mar 2, 2019
Wow… Behe has really thrown down the gauntlet. After reviewing many alternate theories and additions to the new synthesis (including neutral theory, complexity theory, self-organization theory, adaptation or the “principle of tinkeringâ€, etc.), he gets in to the actual data (starting on p. 141). And he make a very strong case that, if any version of evolution actually causes changes above the genus level, it must do so at the biomolecular level (I believe this is a concept that no serious biologist disputes). And due to major innovations over the past few decades, we can now finally pull back the curtain, peer into this black box (yes, pun intended!) and see what exactly is going on at the biomolecular level.
Here are more of Behe’s arguments – there is so much here, a lot of it that I’ve read for the first time (and I’ve read over 100 books plus tons of articles and blogs on both sides of the evolution/intelligent design issues, so I am familiar with what is normally taught and believed on both sides of the issue). I’ll focus on just a few key areas that stood out to me:
God Wouldn’t Have Done it That Way:
Many of the arguments against Behe claim that what he writes is creationist rhetoric, not science. Some claim he says that “God did itâ€, and so that’s that. And many reputable scientists say “God wouldn’t have done it that way.†So here is what Behe says: “What seems quite unworthy to me is the spectacle of scientists basing their conclusions almost completely on a sort of reverse theology. What God would or would not do is not within the competency of science to inquire.†(It seems to me that the ONLY way to argue against Behe on this is for a person to be able to prove that he/she does, in fact, know EXACTLY where God stands on the issue – and this of course would bring up a whole new set of issues which I will not spend any more time going in to.)
“If millions of years of such intense selection on finches as documented by Peter and Rosemary Grant can’t produce anything other than a finch, then what reason besides bad theology is there to suppose it could produce significant new variations on a preexisting flagellum? Occam’s razor cuts both ways.†(p. 290) And this brings up the next subject.
Natural Selection:
I want to state in my own words, not Behe’s, what I now understand: natural selection could actually be far more powerful and potent than others have realized… and yet it operates so much differently than has heretofore been theorized. It powerfully helps to narrow and focus traits to the current environmental niche, regardless of what might actually be in the best long-term interest of the species (after all, it’s unguided, has no goals, and can’t/won’t plan for the future). And its focusing power comes through eliminating useless and/or wasteful traits… and once these changes are fixed, due to having lost prior genetic ability the species may now be less able to adapt to major changes. It’s ability to handle major changes is more narrow than the earlier prior version of the species. And natural selection can’t go back to regain what was culled from the genome since it’s lost -- and random mutations will rarely, if ever, be able to reverse/undo what was done.
Behe sums this up quite succinctly (see p. 227): “… selection fits a system more and more closely to its current biological task, just as we expected, but that makes it more and more difficult to adjust to other potential functions, which we didn’t.â€
Irreducible Complexity:
Behe’s new concept of IC, first introduced in Darwin’s Black Box, has still not been refuted. Yes, many have claimed otherwise in thousands of words that have been copied and pasted ad infinitum. Yet in the appendix to Darwin Devolves, Behe gives details of what has – and has not – happened in the two decades since his first book.
“The book set off an uproar --- scathing editorials and court trials as well as denunciations by scientific societies, national governments, and even a committee of the Council of Europe. In retrospect I don’t think people were upset by the criticism of Darwin’s theory or the concept of irreducible complexity nearly as much as they were by the explicit proposal of intelligent design. For a variety of reasons many scientists and others are viscerally opposed in principle to a conclusion of design for life, and some are spurred to action by it.†(p. 284)
Regarding the bacterial flagellum: “Twenty years on, there has been a grand total of zero serious attempts to show how the elegant molecular machine might have been produced by random processes and natural selection.†(p. 287) Yes, many have “refuted Behe†by using lots of words from the keyboard. But that is easy – anyone can “refute†anything by just saying “that just ain’t so.†But a truly scientific refutation requires more than just imagination and typing. Where's the beef? You need to show it.
Behe expands on the concept of IC with “comprehensively complex†systems and “Mini-IC†(see chapter 9). The basic idea here is that many of the IC systems that Behe discussed in his first book are actually made up of many additional IC systems as you get closer to the biomolecular level. And not just the parts are IC, but so are the mechanisms that must identify and supply the proper raw components in the right proportions to the right locations at the proper time in the proper order. It just boggles the mind to see how any of this could have been produced one simple step at a time where each result after each step was a useful improvement to the species that was useful enough to stand out and then be selected and fixed. (It was so much easier in Darwin’s day, when all he knew was that some type of protoplasmic jelly just did what it needed to do, no need to investigate further.)
Principle of Comparative Difficulty:
“If a task that requires less effort is too difficult to accomplish, then a task that requires more effort necessarily is too†(p. 28). Behe points out that, rather than explaining some of the simpler issues that are the building blocks for evolutionary change, many jump to larger over-arching explanations for what they believe must happen: “Yet if modeling even minor evolutionary effects is quite problematic, then the types of studies done by Stuart Kauffman, Andreas Wagner, and many others – which hope to account for massive evolutionary changes that occur over lengthy time frames – are simply pushing mathematical tools far past what they already labor unsuccessfully to explain. Mathematical models can’t explain greater evolutionary changes if they can’t account for lesser ones. They yield only a pretense of knowledge.†(p. 112)
This concept of comparative difficulty arises throughout the book. To me, I now can see that many of the key arguments made against Behe (and against intelligent design in the whole) cannot stand, since the component building blocks of their critical arguments can’t be supported. Therefore, since their lesser points can’t stand, neither can the more expansive ones.
The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution:
“The amazing but in retrospect unsurprising fact established by the diligent work of many investigators in laboratory evolution over decades is that the great majority of even beneficial positively selected mutations damage an organism’s genetic information – either degrading or outright destroying functional coded elements†(p. 183).
This, my friends, is the core of the book. This is what it’s all about. This is what actually makes the double-edged sword of natural selection far more powerful and quicker than previously thought. And this is what renders its oft-ignored twin blade so limited in what it can actually do. There are so many ways to mess up any complex machine, but relatively few ways to improve it. And since mutations are random, they are far more likely to mess up or degrade the biomolecular machine than they are to identify the very few possible points in the genome that could possibly be changed to improve it.
There is so much to say on this, and the book does an incredible job. Here’s what I believe is one of the most important quotes in the entire book:
“… it’s not so much the rarity of constructive mutations that undermines Darwinian evolution – it’s the frequency of damaging but helpful ones. Degradative but adaptive loss-of-FCT or modification-of-function mutations appear quickly even on short time scales, even in small populations. They don’t need large numbers or long times to occur. Thus they will always be present everywhere in life much more quickly and in far greater numbers than constructive gain-of-FCT mutations. Damaging yet beneficial mutations will rapidly be selected when nothing else is available and compete fiercely with any gain-of-FCT mutations that might eventually arrive on the scene.†(p. 186)
Darwin’s Mechanism:
“Like many others before and after them, Pallen and Matzke carelessly confused evidence for common descent for Darwin’s mechanism.†(p. 289) So many critics cite “millions of years prove...†or “the fossil record shows...†as proof of their position. But the most any of these arguments can show is evidence of common descent. They say nothing about the mechanism, and this is the key argument of Behe’s book: it’s about time we see what the solid scientific evidence shows that actual mechanism of random mutation plus natural selection can actually do.
“The appropriate straightforward criterion is this: if there are good physical reasons to think Darwinian routes wouldn’t work and if after a diligent search no evidence is found that they do, then the theory has failed†(p. 232).
All the key concepts of this book are of course interwoven and expanded upon. Here's a great summation to the problems IC poses to Darwin's mechanism:
“Since IC systems are quite resistant to gradual construction by an unguided process such as Darwin’s mechanism, and since there is no plausible evidence to show that they can be so constructed, it is reasonable to conclude from that alone that random mutation and natural selection did not produce the molecular machines of the cell. What’s more… the actual situation is much worse. When we leave imaginative scenarios behind, in the real world Darwin’s mechanism has profound problems even with biological features that are much simpler than a mousetrap.†(see p. 233)
Lenski’s Research: Where’s the Beef?
We need to explicitly answer the question, “Where’s the beef?†with real data, not just hand waving or creative imaginations or arguments. Real data… real beef!
And Lenski’s lab experiments, over about three decades, finally shows the answer: the beef is virtually non-existent.
Lenski's research is the first, and apparently the most involved, to show what random mutations plus unguided natural selection actually has power to do… and the results show that few, if any, substantive changes occur. After tens of thousands of generations and billions and billions of bacteria, they are all still the same species. And virtually all the changes (even the positive ones that appear to add new functionality) happen by subtracting existing genetic information, not by addition, as shown by the latest technology used to compare genomes. So this does NOT seem to me to go in the direction so many people have believed since Darwin’s Origin of Species first came out.
But Lenski's laboratory experiments cover only about 30 years, so that's not a lot of time to really see evolutionary power in all its glory (ignoring, for the moment, how the impact of billions of specimens over tens of thousands of generations is actually confounding and seriously hurts evolutionary theory). And so I appreciate that Behe also pointed out other examples, such as the African cichlids whose natural habitat spans 500 times longer (about 15,000 years). And yet during all that time, all the varieties of cichlids are still in the same family. Not much to see at the biomolecular level.
But, perhaps that's still not really enough time, so Behe also points out cichlids at Lake Malawi (a few million years of random mutation and natural selection), and Lake Tanganyika (about 10 million years, or about 333,000 times longer than Lenski's in-lab results). Following this evidence to where it leads provides no support for any type of evolutionary change beyond the genus level.
So I ask again: Where's the Beef? I want to see contrary evidence that shows, from a biomolecular view, that evolutionary power is more potent than this. I'm a computer programmer, and understand that models can be created that show otherwise. That's all fine and dandy... and it makes for some wonderful results that can show almost any desired output. But I see a big difference between carefully programmed models designed to show one thing, compared with the actual study of real-life examples to see what really happens in the real world.
Many intelligent people have made strong accusations against Behe and who point out what they see as major, even fatal, flaws in his conclusions. That doesn’t surprise anyone who objectively wants to follow the evidence to where it leads, to see that others are willing to sincerely critique Behe's newly-announced findings. That is how science should operate... and yet real science should also then continue on and point to real-life results that go contrary to, or refute, Behe. Or that support his theses. But if nobody can point to real contrary biomolecular evidence, then Behe's argument stands. (And yet in real life, as we all know, for at least the short term this then just boils down to who can tell the best story, or who has the most power to control what is presented and taught as truth in the universities and in the media, actual truth be damned.)
So for all those who are certain that Behe is easily refuted, and that evolution's ability goes well beyond what he shows, then I'm sure there's another lake somewhere, maybe with cichlid-like fish or other creatures, where over millions of years there has now developed actual biomolecular evidence proving changes well beyond the family level, and contrary to Behe.
The bottom line: you need to read this book and judge for yourself who’s posturing, bluffing, or blowing smoke. To me, it’s obvious.
Game over. Case closed."
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Darwin Devolves The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution Audible Audio Edition Michael J Behe Tim Andres Pabon HarperAudio Books Reviews :
Darwin Devolves The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution Audible Audio Edition Michael J Behe Tim Andres Pabon HarperAudio Books Reviews
- Update Mar 2, 2019 See my update below, now that I’ve finished the book. (Summary this is THE BOOK you must read, whether you are a staunch supporter/believer of any type of Darwinian evolution, or of intelligent design. Breath-taking, major issues that must be answered; a total game changer!)
Original review – Feb 26, 2019
I got my copy this afternoon (I didn't realize shipped it on Saturday so it would arrive today - thank you, !).
I was glad to read in the Introduction about Michael Behe's personal path from a never-questioning believer in evolution to an insistent questioner who got mad once he finally realized that none of his professors had ever critiqued Darwin's theories. This turn-around came after he read Denton's "Evolution A Theory in Crisis" and began to realize there were serious problems with the theory, and so he began his current quest to research and study the data himself to see what the evidence actually shows.
Two of his comments (just from the Introduction) I found very insightful
* He originally was led to believe in Darwin's theory not for strong evidence for it, but for sociological reasons "that simply was the way educated people were expected to think these days."
* "When one starts to treat Darwinism as a hypothesis about the biochemical level of life rather than as an assumption, it takes about ten minutes to conclude it's radically inadequate."
This parallels what I've experienced. Now, I'm a software developer and entrepreneur, not a trained scientist. And I've had a lot of (mostly unwanted) litigation experience, where I've seen people make up arguments with next to no support, whose main objectives were to hurt me and my companies. And so I've learned to ask hard questions, to question assumptions, to uncover hidden objectives (which often have seemed to simply cover extreme or fatal weaknesses to arguments of the other side) to get to a proper understanding of what really happened. And so I appreciate that this is what Michael Behe is doing.
I know this book is going to cause major problems for him and his profession as he further pulls back the curtain that has enabled his field to largely ignore key issues that are fatal to evolutionary theory, he will be slammed hard, called out for surrendering to pseudo science, effectively securing his position as possibly the worst menace to all of science as we know it today.
One last point (out of many!) from chapter 1 is what Behe calls "red flag number one" where researchers and/or reporters display "pretend (or feigned) knowledge" as they add gratuitous affirmations of evolutionary theory due to their biased pro-evolutionary assumptions.
He shows this clearly in his first example where he contrasts these two sentences "Humans have evolved a sense of self that is unparalleled in its complexity" and "Humans have a sense of self that is unparalleled in its complexity". Behe then asks the question, "what information has been lost by deleting the word 'evolved'?" There were no studies done to demonstrate how evolutionary processes could produce a mind with a sense of self; the word "evolved" carries no information, but it's "just a science-y, content-free salute to the notion that everything about living beings ... simply must have come about by the ordinary evolutionary processes that biologists study." We see this in so many papers and articles, where writers "plant Darwin's flag everywhere" -- without valid scientific reason, and just based on unwarranted and untested assumptions. And when you remove the gratuitous "evolved" flags, the statements lose absolutely nothing and yet then become more honest and accurate.
OK, 'nuff said... for now.
Awesome book, hard to put down, perhaps impossible for confirmed evolutionists to handle, but for those open to sincere questioning and willing to follow the evidence where it leads, I highly recommend it.
Update Mar 2, 2019
Wow… Behe has really thrown down the gauntlet. After reviewing many alternate theories and additions to the new synthesis (including neutral theory, complexity theory, self-organization theory, adaptation or the “principle of tinkeringâ€, etc.), he gets in to the actual data (starting on p. 141). And he make a very strong case that, if any version of evolution actually causes changes above the genus level, it must do so at the biomolecular level (I believe this is a concept that no serious biologist disputes). And due to major innovations over the past few decades, we can now finally pull back the curtain, peer into this black box (yes, pun intended!) and see what exactly is going on at the biomolecular level.
Here are more of Behe’s arguments – there is so much here, a lot of it that I’ve read for the first time (and I’ve read over 100 books plus tons of articles and blogs on both sides of the evolution/intelligent design issues, so I am familiar with what is normally taught and believed on both sides of the issue). I’ll focus on just a few key areas that stood out to me
God Wouldn’t Have Done it That Way
Many of the arguments against Behe claim that what he writes is creationist rhetoric, not science. Some claim he says that “God did itâ€, and so that’s that. And many reputable scientists say “God wouldn’t have done it that way.†So here is what Behe says “What seems quite unworthy to me is the spectacle of scientists basing their conclusions almost completely on a sort of reverse theology. What God would or would not do is not within the competency of science to inquire.†(It seems to me that the ONLY way to argue against Behe on this is for a person to be able to prove that he/she does, in fact, know EXACTLY where God stands on the issue – and this of course would bring up a whole new set of issues which I will not spend any more time going in to.)
“If millions of years of such intense selection on finches as documented by Peter and Rosemary Grant can’t produce anything other than a finch, then what reason besides bad theology is there to suppose it could produce significant new variations on a preexisting flagellum? Occam’s razor cuts both ways.†(p. 290) And this brings up the next subject.
Natural Selection
I want to state in my own words, not Behe’s, what I now understand natural selection could actually be far more powerful and potent than others have realized… and yet it operates so much differently than has heretofore been theorized. It powerfully helps to narrow and focus traits to the current environmental niche, regardless of what might actually be in the best long-term interest of the species (after all, it’s unguided, has no goals, and can’t/won’t plan for the future). And its focusing power comes through eliminating useless and/or wasteful traits… and once these changes are fixed, due to having lost prior genetic ability the species may now be less able to adapt to major changes. It’s ability to handle major changes is more narrow than the earlier prior version of the species. And natural selection can’t go back to regain what was culled from the genome since it’s lost -- and random mutations will rarely, if ever, be able to reverse/undo what was done.
Behe sums this up quite succinctly (see p. 227) “… selection fits a system more and more closely to its current biological task, just as we expected, but that makes it more and more difficult to adjust to other potential functions, which we didn’t.â€
Irreducible Complexity
Behe’s new concept of IC, first introduced in Darwin’s Black Box, has still not been refuted. Yes, many have claimed otherwise in thousands of words that have been copied and pasted ad infinitum. Yet in the appendix to Darwin Devolves, Behe gives details of what has – and has not – happened in the two decades since his first book.
“The book set off an uproar --- scathing editorials and court trials as well as denunciations by scientific societies, national governments, and even a committee of the Council of Europe. In retrospect I don’t think people were upset by the criticism of Darwin’s theory or the concept of irreducible complexity nearly as much as they were by the explicit proposal of intelligent design. For a variety of reasons many scientists and others are viscerally opposed in principle to a conclusion of design for life, and some are spurred to action by it.†(p. 284)
Regarding the bacterial flagellum “Twenty years on, there has been a grand total of zero serious attempts to show how the elegant molecular machine might have been produced by random processes and natural selection.†(p. 287) Yes, many have “refuted Behe†by using lots of words from the keyboard. But that is easy – anyone can “refute†anything by just saying “that just ain’t so.†But a truly scientific refutation requires more than just imagination and typing. Where's the beef? You need to show it.
Behe expands on the concept of IC with “comprehensively complex†systems and “Mini-IC†(see chapter 9). The basic idea here is that many of the IC systems that Behe discussed in his first book are actually made up of many additional IC systems as you get closer to the biomolecular level. And not just the parts are IC, but so are the mechanisms that must identify and supply the proper raw components in the right proportions to the right locations at the proper time in the proper order. It just boggles the mind to see how any of this could have been produced one simple step at a time where each result after each step was a useful improvement to the species that was useful enough to stand out and then be selected and fixed. (It was so much easier in Darwin’s day, when all he knew was that some type of protoplasmic jelly just did what it needed to do, no need to investigate further.)
Principle of Comparative Difficulty
“If a task that requires less effort is too difficult to accomplish, then a task that requires more effort necessarily is too†(p. 28). Behe points out that, rather than explaining some of the simpler issues that are the building blocks for evolutionary change, many jump to larger over-arching explanations for what they believe must happen “Yet if modeling even minor evolutionary effects is quite problematic, then the types of studies done by Stuart Kauffman, Andreas Wagner, and many others – which hope to account for massive evolutionary changes that occur over lengthy time frames – are simply pushing mathematical tools far past what they already labor unsuccessfully to explain. Mathematical models can’t explain greater evolutionary changes if they can’t account for lesser ones. They yield only a pretense of knowledge.†(p. 112)
This concept of comparative difficulty arises throughout the book. To me, I now can see that many of the key arguments made against Behe (and against intelligent design in the whole) cannot stand, since the component building blocks of their critical arguments can’t be supported. Therefore, since their lesser points can’t stand, neither can the more expansive ones.
The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution
“The amazing but in retrospect unsurprising fact established by the diligent work of many investigators in laboratory evolution over decades is that the great majority of even beneficial positively selected mutations damage an organism’s genetic information – either degrading or outright destroying functional coded elements†(p. 183).
This, my friends, is the core of the book. This is what it’s all about. This is what actually makes the double-edged sword of natural selection far more powerful and quicker than previously thought. And this is what renders its oft-ignored twin blade so limited in what it can actually do. There are so many ways to mess up any complex machine, but relatively few ways to improve it. And since mutations are random, they are far more likely to mess up or degrade the biomolecular machine than they are to identify the very few possible points in the genome that could possibly be changed to improve it.
There is so much to say on this, and the book does an incredible job. Here’s what I believe is one of the most important quotes in the entire book
“… it’s not so much the rarity of constructive mutations that undermines Darwinian evolution – it’s the frequency of damaging but helpful ones. Degradative but adaptive loss-of-FCT or modification-of-function mutations appear quickly even on short time scales, even in small populations. They don’t need large numbers or long times to occur. Thus they will always be present everywhere in life much more quickly and in far greater numbers than constructive gain-of-FCT mutations. Damaging yet beneficial mutations will rapidly be selected when nothing else is available and compete fiercely with any gain-of-FCT mutations that might eventually arrive on the scene.†(p. 186)
Darwin’s Mechanism
“Like many others before and after them, Pallen and Matzke carelessly confused evidence for common descent for Darwin’s mechanism.†(p. 289) So many critics cite “millions of years prove...†or “the fossil record shows...†as proof of their position. But the most any of these arguments can show is evidence of common descent. They say nothing about the mechanism, and this is the key argument of Behe’s book it’s about time we see what the solid scientific evidence shows that actual mechanism of random mutation plus natural selection can actually do.
“The appropriate straightforward criterion is this if there are good physical reasons to think Darwinian routes wouldn’t work and if after a diligent search no evidence is found that they do, then the theory has failed†(p. 232).
All the key concepts of this book are of course interwoven and expanded upon. Here's a great summation to the problems IC poses to Darwin's mechanism
“Since IC systems are quite resistant to gradual construction by an unguided process such as Darwin’s mechanism, and since there is no plausible evidence to show that they can be so constructed, it is reasonable to conclude from that alone that random mutation and natural selection did not produce the molecular machines of the cell. What’s more… the actual situation is much worse. When we leave imaginative scenarios behind, in the real world Darwin’s mechanism has profound problems even with biological features that are much simpler than a mousetrap.†(see p. 233)
Lenski’s Research Where’s the Beef?
We need to explicitly answer the question, “Where’s the beef?†with real data, not just hand waving or creative imaginations or arguments. Real data… real beef!
And Lenski’s lab experiments, over about three decades, finally shows the answer the beef is virtually non-existent.
Lenski's research is the first, and apparently the most involved, to show what random mutations plus unguided natural selection actually has power to do… and the results show that few, if any, substantive changes occur. After tens of thousands of generations and billions and billions of bacteria, they are all still the same species. And virtually all the changes (even the positive ones that appear to add new functionality) happen by subtracting existing genetic information, not by addition, as shown by the latest technology used to compare genomes. So this does NOT seem to me to go in the direction so many people have believed since Darwin’s Origin of Species first came out.
But Lenski's laboratory experiments cover only about 30 years, so that's not a lot of time to really see evolutionary power in all its glory (ignoring, for the moment, how the impact of billions of specimens over tens of thousands of generations is actually confounding and seriously hurts evolutionary theory). And so I appreciate that Behe also pointed out other examples, such as the African cichlids whose natural habitat spans 500 times longer (about 15,000 years). And yet during all that time, all the varieties of cichlids are still in the same family. Not much to see at the biomolecular level.
But, perhaps that's still not really enough time, so Behe also points out cichlids at Lake Malawi (a few million years of random mutation and natural selection), and Lake Tanganyika (about 10 million years, or about 333,000 times longer than Lenski's in-lab results). Following this evidence to where it leads provides no support for any type of evolutionary change beyond the genus level.
So I ask again Where's the Beef? I want to see contrary evidence that shows, from a biomolecular view, that evolutionary power is more potent than this. I'm a computer programmer, and understand that models can be created that show otherwise. That's all fine and dandy... and it makes for some wonderful results that can show almost any desired output. But I see a big difference between carefully programmed models designed to show one thing, compared with the actual study of real-life examples to see what really happens in the real world.
Many intelligent people have made strong accusations against Behe and who point out what they see as major, even fatal, flaws in his conclusions. That doesn’t surprise anyone who objectively wants to follow the evidence to where it leads, to see that others are willing to sincerely critique Behe's newly-announced findings. That is how science should operate... and yet real science should also then continue on and point to real-life results that go contrary to, or refute, Behe. Or that support his theses. But if nobody can point to real contrary biomolecular evidence, then Behe's argument stands. (And yet in real life, as we all know, for at least the short term this then just boils down to who can tell the best story, or who has the most power to control what is presented and taught as truth in the universities and in the media, actual truth be damned.)
So for all those who are certain that Behe is easily refuted, and that evolution's ability goes well beyond what he shows, then I'm sure there's another lake somewhere, maybe with cichlid-like fish or other creatures, where over millions of years there has now developed actual biomolecular evidence proving changes well beyond the family level, and contrary to Behe.
The bottom line you need to read this book and judge for yourself who’s posturing, bluffing, or blowing smoke. To me, it’s obvious.
Game over. Case closed. - Michael Behe's works, for all their flaws, have always been the gold standard of creationist writing. He avoids citing creationist sources, including the books of his Discovery Institute peers. His forays into the culture war that lies at the true heart of ID Creationism are brief and limited. He has legitimate credentials as a biochemist. His ideas are, for the most part, his own, and he has the rhetorical skills to defend them. But scrutiny of those ideas invariably shows that we are dealing here more with iron pyrite than with gold. This book, in which he seeks to show that mutation and natural selection mostly evolve organisms by "devolving" -- by damage to functioning DNA sequences -- is akin to his prior efforts, and, like them, comes to nothing.
How so? Let's look at a few things.
In order to make the point that natural evolutionary processes can't generate a lot of diversity (he announces here that the limits of natural biological evolution lie at the family level -- that while evolution may develop genera and species, it can do no more) he points to a couple of interesting real-world examples (Darwin's finches and the cichlids of Lake Victoria) and also to the E. coli work of Richard Lenski (whose critical review of this book, incidentally, can be found in Science, Feb. 8, 2019, p. 590).
The problem with this approach, strangely, is right there in plain sight. At page 155 he says
"Well, lengthy as it is, might two million years be insufficient for major evolutionary changes to take place? Demonstrably not. Most of the many, profoundly different animal phyla that arose during the Cambrian explosion did so in only about ten million years; mammals diversified rapidly in roughly the same amount of time after the dinosaurs disappeared;whales arose from a terrestrial ancestor in about the same time. Surely we should expect at least one crummy new phylum, class or order to be conjured by Darwin's vaunted mechanism in the time the finches have been on the Galapagos. But no, nothing. A surprising but compelling conclusion is that Darwin's mechanism has been wildly overrated -- it is incapable of producting much biological change at all."
What Behe has done here is pretty strange. He's decided that we can take Darwin's finches as an adaptive radiation that illustrates the most extreme possible results of evolution -- and then points to multiple cases where it did more! On what ground does one use the SLOWEST of the examples to illustrate the FASTEST possible rate of change? Can Behe demonstrate that something other than natural evolutionary processes account for these other events? He cannot, of course.
Now, it may be that Behe doesn't understand the differences between the finch, cichlid and E. coli examples he employs and these adaptive radiations. It may be, alternatively, that he does understand but hopes his readers will not. But no biologist is going to follow him, for a few simple reasons.
Each of the examples he gives of evolution producting limited results involves a constrained environment with few opportunities for allopatric speciation -- small islands, a single lake, or a monoculture of bacteria in a lab. These are nothing like the rise of the mammals, the Cambrian explosion or the evolution of whales. Where the island finches or the cichlids face a tightly bounded environment, and the E. coli even more so, with limited ecological niches to exploit, the mammals suddenly found themselves on a planet containing every sort of natural environment, where the dominant large fauna had been comprehensively destroyed. No top predators, no large herbivores, nothing in between -- and this led to a vast adaptive radiation with plenty of morphological innovation. The evolution of whales is a narrower phenomenon, but another marvelous example of post-extinction niche exploitation -- mosasaurs had been taken out by the K-Pg extinction along with the dinosaurs. What comparable opportunity did Darwin's finches have?
The Cambrian explosion, likewise. First, it didn't happen in ten million years as Behe says. The paper he cites by Doug Erwin for that point says no such thing (and is well worth a read!). As the excellent book on the Cambrian explosion by Doug Erwin and James Valentine shows, this era had it all complex single-celled eukaryotes, early small multicellular creatures (beginning, well before the Cambrian, with sponges), and increasing oxygen levels in the seas which enabled larger and more complex body sizes. The existence of cellular regulatory functions in single-celled organisms provided an ample source from which development-regulating functions could be derived for early multicellular animals, and as animals increased in size and complexity they opened new ecological opportunities for themselves and for each other -- the first construction of truly complex ecosystems. Apart from stationary filter-feeding or microbial mats, every ecological niche was wide open for new organisms.
What on earth does Behe suppose Darwin's finches ought to have done? Evolve into whale-birds or bird-monkeys? What compelling case does Behe make that some immense ecological gap in the Galapagos provided these finches a K-Pg-like opportunity? None at all. He merely hopes his reader will suppose that if vast adaptive radiations ever happen at all, they must therefore always happen in all circumstances.
Behe's principal argument -- that evolutionary processes overwhelmingly break things -- has been addressed in reviews by his peers, and found badly wanting. It seems it is based, as usual, on a good deal of selective viewing of the data. If you'd like to know what's actually going on with polar bears, E. coli, et cetera, I'd suggest reviewing the responses of people who are expert in those topics; Lenski has blogged about the book, for example. These matters are more complex than can easily be treated in a book review; anyone who takes Behe at face value is liable to be surprised by the facts.
But while some of Behe's biochemical arguments are best addressed by specialists, there are still some rather glaring problems that the layman should easily see
(1) By lumping mutations which "break" regulatory sequences into the same group as those which break genes, Behe inflates the tendency for mutations to result in real "loss of information." Changes to gene regulation are enormously important in evolution, and because such things as binding sites are much simpler than genes, and generally do not require the kinds of complex molecular features which Behe discusses, one must not consider changes in gene regulation, even by disruption of a regulatory feature, to necessarily be "losses" of information.
(2) In a chapter titled "Dollo's Timeless Law," he points out -- no surprise -- that it's not easy for a gene which has been mutated and selected away from its ancestral form to de-evolve backward, against the forces of selection, in the exact path to its exact ancestral form. He then equates the low probability of this very specific, anti-selection pathway to the probability of the gene mutating into ANY functional form in the future. That, of course, simply doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
(3) This whole argument is against morphological novelty at the cellular level -- but what Behe doesn't mention is that in multicellular animal evolution, there's really very little of that going on, anyhow. An enormous amount of the variety among mammals, for example, is accounted for by differences in gene expression or small differences in the genes themselves. At the "cellular machine" level with which Behe is principally concerned, there simply isn't much (if, indeed, any) novelty needed to make a squirrel that isn't also needed to make a rhinoceros. That tail, despite appearances, is no flagellum.
Where is Behe going with all of this? After showing us what he thinks is NOT happening, what does he say IS happening? Well, he gives us a glimpse of that when discussing lemurs (p. 168)
"Thus the groupings may be an artifact of classification or,much more intriguingly, perhaps the result of intrinsic, intelligently provided information carried by the ancestor of lemurs, during a period when many new major categories of mammalian life arose."
So, Jehovah stands on an East African beach, using CRSPR to stuff the genomes of a small batch of ur-lemurs with bunches of redundant functioning alleles before launching them on a raft-ride to Madagascar so that, on arrival, they can start individually losing various of these alleles to allow themselves to sort into novel species. This -- a divine being whose personal intervention is required for virtually every occurrence of genetic or morphological novelty -- may be the thought that comforts Behe, but if he expects it to bring many scientists into his fold, he may find the results disappointing. As lovely as the notion of a divinely-hosted prosimian going-away beach party may be, the evidence for it is scanty.
The worst bits of books by Discovery Institute fellows often come when the authors decide to range into the philosophical realm, and Behe ends his book with some truly cringeworthy material. He insists that the whole issue is about "mind." He is so confused by the idea of people who think cognition comes from the brain that he repeatedly characterizes them as believing that minds do not exist at all. He supposes -- though how he does is not altogether clear -- that the existence of minds is itself a disproof of materialism. Along the way, he drops a lengthy endnote criticizing the Kitzmiller decision in which he mostly shows that he doesn't understand how litigation works. Yes, believe it or not, when judges ask for "proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law," they actually mean it.
That last bit may be understandable, as Behe is undoubtedly aware that of all the nails in ID Creationism's coffin, the one he drove in with his disastrous testimony in Kitzmiller is one of the most secure. If resurrection is to be hoped for, it will not come from this book, which will convince nobody who is already reasonably well-versed in biology.
But for the book's intended audience, who are not so well-versed, a warning as creationists go, Behe is pretty much sui generis, and his views are as incompatible with the particular dogmas of most creationists as they are with the scientific consensus. He thinks that evolution happened, and does happen. He thinks that mutation and natural selection play important parts in evolution, even though he thinks they are somewhat limited. He affirms again in this book his acceptance of the common ancestry of all living things, and it's clear that he thinks that our common ancestor lived a lot longer than 6,000 years ago. If anybody thinks that this book is going to help him to defend the literal tale of Noah's ark, well -- that ship has sailed. - From my reading, Behe documents the fact that most mutations are either neutral or harmful. He notes the major problem is, although some mutations can produce an advantage in certain, often restricted environments, over 99 percent of all mutations are near neutral, deleterious (very harmful), or lethal. The evidence is clear each new generation of humans contains many thousands of new mutations. Near neutral means they only cause slight damage, but the slight damage adds up in time, eventually causing genetic catastrophe, i.e. death. Each child has about 100 new mutations compared to his or her parents, and this child’s children are burdened with close to an additional 100 new mutations.
Thus, according to research, the mutation number in humans is accumulating, eventually leading to a mutational meltdown and species extinction. The same mutational events in human somatic cells is a major cause of aging. Thus, entire species age, as also do all life forms. Aging of species from dogs to humans will eventually cause extinction.
The view that mutations are our creator, not God, is the view most leading scientists favor. It is a worldview that supports the idea that humans, and all life, are the result of billions of genetic damages caused by carcinogens and other poisons, not an intelligent creator. This view is not only irresponsible but contrary to observable fact as Behe documents.
