Behe’s Three Mighty Blows against Darwinism (includes a review of Darwin Devolves)

I previously read Behe’s first two books, Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution.

I was really looking forward to Michael Behe’s newest book, Darwin Devolves. In fact, it’s the first book I ever ordered in advance of its release date. As soon as it arrived, I consumed the book like a marathoner in training consumes carbohydrates. I was not disappointed.

At the bottom of this blog post I’ve included a copy of the review I wrote and posted on Amazon. My main purpose in writing this post is not to review the book, but to explain the big picture of Behe’s arguments in his three books for those of you unlikely to read them (or if you would like a simple summary to share with others). But before I attempt to give a simple summary of the main point of each of his three books, I want to take time to explain why this topic is important.

The truth that God created everything is a fundamental truth emphasized throughout the Bible

The first verse of God’s Word teaches that God created everything. The rest of the first chapter of Genesis is about God actively creating each of the parts of our world. This fundamental truth is reemphasized throughout Scripture. It’s not merely that the bare fact that God created everything is repeated. Rather, this foundational truth is related to other important truths and provides motivation to both trust and worship God. Here are some examples (you should be able to see verses pop up by holding your cursor over the references):

* Since God made everything He has the right to destroy it if we distort His creation (Genesis 6:6; Genesis 6:7; Genesis 7:4).

* Since God made us, it is foolish and senseless not to obey and honor Him (Deuteronomy 32:6).

* The fact that God created everything gave King Hezekiah faith and hope when he was facing an overwhelming enemy. It motivated Hezekiah’s effective prayer (2 Kings 19:15).

* One big difference between the true God and false idols is that our true God made the world (1 Chronicles 16:26; Psalm 96:5; Jeremiah 10:11; Acts 14:15; Acts 17:24).

* At the end of Job, God reminds Job that He knows what He’s doing. One of the main ways God does this is by pointing to His marvelous creation and mentioning specific examples (Job 38ff).

* The authors of the Psalms often rejoice in the truth that God is the Creator of all things. It is a chief reason to praise Him (Psalm 33:6; Psalm 100:3; Psalm 104:24; Psalm 115:15; Psalm 121:2; Psalm 124:8; Psalm 134:3; Psalm 136:5; Psalm 146:6).

* The prophets often point to God’s greatness and power by reminding us that He made everything. His role as Creator is also an important reason that we should listen to Him (Isaiah 37:16; Isaiah 42:5; Isaiah 44:24; Isaiah 45:12; Isaiah 45:18; Isaiah 51:13; Isaiah 54:5; Jeremiah 10:12; Jeremiah 27:5; Jeremiah 32:17; Jeremiah 33:2; Jeremiah 51:15; Amos 4:13; Amos 5:8; Zechariah 12:1).

* When the Apostles and early Christians are threatened with violence, imprisonment, and death, the fact that God made everything gives them courage to cry out to Him in prayer (Acts 4:24, you may read additional thoughts on this in blog posts I’ve written here and here).

* One of the most important ways that the Bible teaches the deity of Christ and His unity with the Father is by telling us that Jesus created everything (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:2, for more thoughts on this, read Two Awesome Truths that Demonstrate the Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ).

* In the book of Revelation one of the great reasons for praising and worshiping God forever is that He created all things (Revelation 4:11, 14:7).

The truth that God made all things is a bedrock of our Christian faith and it leads us to worship, trust, and obey God. It is no wonder that this truth is constantly under attack.

For those influenced by it, the theory of evolution erodes belief in God and diminishes evidence for Him.

Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, warned us that people would suppress the truth. More specifically, he warned us that people suppress the truth about our great Creator as seen in creation.

For God's wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse.

 (Rom. 1:18-20 CSB17)

Darwinism is a widespread suppression of the truth that the world we live in points to a great Creator. That’s why books like Behe’s are important. Behe’s three books deliver three mighty blows to smash the lie of darwinian evolution. Ironically, he does so by using a vulnerability in the theory which Darwin himself recognized.

Darwinian evolution can only, even theoretically, take small steps upward

The mechanism that Darwin described consists of two parts: (1) random variations and (2) natural selection. Pretty much everyone (young earth creationists, intelligent design advocates, hard core materialist evolutionists, and everyone in between) who has studied this topic agrees that these two mechanisms exist.

Random variation just means that the descendants of organisms are different (usually in very minor ways) than their parents and members of the same species have minor differences. Darwin didn’t know how the random variations took place. He knew almost nothing at all about what happens inside of cells. Today, we understand that random variations take the form of changes in the sequence of base pairs in the DNA molecule. While the cell has an extremely accurate way of copying DNA, it is not perfect. Small changes in the DNA can result in changes in proteins which in turn change the cell and organisms made up of cells (all living things are made up of cells). So random variation is real and reasonably well understood.

Some of the random changes in DNA may help an organism to better survive and reproduce. The theory of natural selection is the common sense observation that any organisms that have helpful changes will out compete other organisms without those changes. Over time, helpful changes can build up. That’s natural selection. So far, none of this is controversial. The controversial part is the claim that this combined mechanism, natural selection working on random variations, can account for all the variation in life and for all the complex parts of living things like the human eye.

Darwin himself was aware of a big potential problem for his theory. He wrote,

Natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight, successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest steps (Origin of Species, p. 162, as quoted by Behe in Darwin Devolves, p. 230).

Darwin also wrote,

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down (Origin of Species, p. 158, as quoted by Behe in Darwin Devolves, p. 230).

To understand what Darwin meant let’s consider a concreate example. The human eye is an incredibly complex organ. This is easy to see in illustrations of the eye like the one below.

Darwin recognized that something like a human eye could not just pop into existence wholly formed. That’s not at all what his theory proposes. What his theory proposes is that an organism a long time ago started with something like a light sensitive spot. This might help it to swim towards light. Then little by little, over many millions of years, the light sensitive spot got more and more complex, with each slight improvement helping the organism until finally we have the human eye. At least that’s how the darwinian story goes.

Using Darwin’s own statement that evolution cannot “take a leap” allows us to come up with an analogy that can be used to explain how each of Behe’s three books delivers a mighty blow against Darwinism. Imagine a man named DP (Darwinian Process) wants to get to the top of a high mountain. In real life, the man would use climbing equipment or might even fly in a helicopter. But being Darwinian he is not intelligent (Darwinian processes are not intelligent) and he can only step up or jump up. He’s not superman. No giant leaps in a single bound (this is exactly what Darwin said evolution cannot do – take a giant leap in a single step). The tall mountain could represent any complex aspect of living things: a functioning eye, a molecular machine like the flagellum, a blood clotting system, or even a whole organism like a free living bacterial cell. The more complex the thing is we’re trying to describe, the higher the mountain. The simplest cell is amazingly complex (see this blog post about the simplest possible free living cell).

By the way, what do we mean by “complex”? We mean that many parts with specific sizes, shapes, and characteristics have to be precisely arranged in order to achieve some function. For example, all the parts of the eye must be carefully arranged in order to produce vision. Of course, this is a simplification because the eye cannot “see” by itself. Its function would be more precisely defined as receiving and processing visual information in the form of light and sending this information in the form of electric signals via optic nerves to the parts of the brain that translate vast amounts of information into images that we “see.” It’s like mountains on top of mountains on top of mountains of complexity. But we’re going to look at just one mountain in isolation.

If DP has to get to the top of any of these mountains in one step, it would be impossible. That would be like the human eye (or any other example of a complex part of life) popping into existence all at once. But evolutionists propose that all these mountains may have a backside that has a very long, gentle rising slope. DP could climb this slope by taking thousands of small steps, each one by itself being manageable. The following illustrations might help make this clearer.

The above illustration is a simplification intended to help you see the basic issue. The rising slope would not be completely smooth, but would consist of many small steps. Each step must have the following characteristics: 1.) it must be small enough to be produced by random variation in an organism and 2.) it must produce some benefit to the organism that allows natural selection to favor the variation over similar organisms without the variation. If those two requirements are met, then it seems plausible that a Darwinian process (DP) could climb up the mountain and eventually produce a very complex part of a living being.

Darwin was not able to test his theory because he did not even know about the level of life where the random variation occurs, namely DNA. Relatively recent scientific discoveries, tools, and data from experiments have allowed the theory to be examined more closely. This is exactly what Michael Behe does in each of his three books. In the first book he asks if there are any steps too large for DP to take. In the second book he examines how big of steps DP can take upwards based on real life data. In the third book he looks at new data that tells us in what direction DP actually moves using real life examples. I’ll briefly explain each of these, but my brief explanations are not, of course, any substitute for the detailed, well documented explanations Behe provides in his books.

Mighty Blow #1: In Darwin’s Black Box Behe shows there are steps too big for DP

The title of Behe’s first book is based on the fact that the cell was like a closed black box in Darwin’s day. He didn’t know what was inside it. In fact, many scientists in Darwin’s day thought cells were very simple little blobs of jelly-like substance that were not complex at all. Boy were they wrong!

In this book Behe introduces the concept of irreducible complexity. That sounds like a complex concept (pun intended), but it’s really not hard to understand. Something is irreducibly complex if it needs multiple parts fitted together all at once in order to function. Take away one of the multiple necessary parts and the item doesn’t merely function a little less well, it doesn’t function at all. Behe gives the example of a mousetrap.

 

If you take away the base, a mousetrap doesn’t work at all. The same is true if you take away the spring, or the hammer, or the latch, or the trip. You can’t build a mousetrap that works a little bit with just a base.

In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe goes into quite a bit of detail to illustrate several examples of features of living beings that are irreducibly complex like the mousetrap, even more so. The most famous example, which has become an icon of the intelligent design movement, is the bacterial flagellum. The flagellum is a molecular machine. Specifically, it is an outboard motor that some bacteria use to swim.

Behe gives other examples of irreducibly complex elements in living things. Even the simplest light sensing cells are shown to be irreducibly complex. Behe also discusses blood clotting systems and parts of immune systems and other examples. He has the gift of teaching which allows him to describe very complex biochemical systems in ways that non-experts can understand. And he shows that many of these systems are irreducibly complex.

DP can’t produce an irreducibly complex system because an irreducibly complex system has no gentle rising slope. Remember, for DP to work, each step on the theoretical slope would have to function enough to give the organism a survival advantage over its peers. Half an outboard motor is useless.

 

For those with eyes to see (no thanks to DP!), Behe’s first book should have settled the issue. Darwinian processes cannot possibly produce the multitude of amazingly irreducibly complex systems found in all living beings. Behe’s book has helped many people to see this truth. But the error of attributing all living things to darwinian processes did not die. It is still the widespread view among scientists. Why?

When we lived in a tropical nation, we had to deal with having a lot of bugs in our home. The giant larger-than-tarantula spiders looked really scary, but with one moderately good swat they would be completely immobilized and easily killed. The armored, flying, big roaches were a different story. More than once I swatted one quite hard only to watch it continue to scurry across the floor. The solution? Keep swatting, and you’ll eventually kill it.

The error of molecules-to-man evolution has proved to be more like the roaches than the spiders. It’s hard to say exactly why this is true. Part of it has to do with group think and with a scientific community that attacks any dissenters on this issue. Dissenters have been known to lose their jobs, and that’s a big deal. That kind of atmosphere can keep an error alive when it should be dead. I suspect that in some cases there may be other types of reasons. Some people have a very strong preference for believing in darwinian processes over  believing in God. Darwinian processes don’t tell you who you can sleep with. God does.

Thankfully, when darwinism wasn’t killed with his first blow, Michael Behe (and others) didn’t give up. Like me with the roaches, he kept swatting!

Mighty Blow #2: In The Edge of Evolution, Behe showed how big (or small!) a step up DP is actually able to take.

The field of biochemistry has been advancing very rapidly over the last few decades due to new tools and hard-working scientists. Much new knowledge has been gained. Behe analyzed a lot of real-life information to try to determine just how big a step up darwinian processes can take. In other words, how much increase in complexity can be achieved by the combination of random variation and natural selection?

The details, unsurprisingly, are complex. Behe looks at several examples from real life. One of the chief examples is the development of chloroquine resistance by the malaria parasite. A person with a malaria infection may have one trillion malaria cells in their body. Resistance to chloroquine has arisen less than ten times in the last half century. Based on all this, Behe estimates “that the odds of a parasite developing resistance to chlororquine is roughly one in a hundred billion billion. In shorthand scientific notation, that’s one in 10^20” (p. 57).

Malaria parasites developing resistance to chloroquine is a real life example of random variation and natural selection in action. The darwinian process is real. However, the details of this example severely undermine claims that darwinian processes could produce things like bacterial flagellums, photo receptor cells in eyes, or blood clotting systems, much less butterflies, dolphins, and people. The first problem is that the parasites did not produce some new, complex molecular machine or system to resist chloroquine. The changes required were miniscule compared to what is needed to account for examples of irreducible complexity. It’s like comparing the ability to take a step up onto a twelve-inch rock to the ability to leap up to the top of Everest. I’m not exaggerating. Yet, the fact that chloroquine resistance arises very rarely indicates that it’s pretty close to the largest step up in complexity that DP can take. That’s the first problem.

The second problem can be seen when the DP mechanisms have to work in creatures like humans. By any reasonable estimate there have been many orders of magnitude less primates (the supposed ancestors of humans) in the history of the world than 10^20. Vastly less. That means it is unlikely that a single step up in complexity equal to the step up required for malaria to gain chloroquine resistance could have occurred in the entire history of primates. This one fact alone, based on hard data from a real-life example, is devastating to evolutionary theory.

I realize I’m not giving details. Read Behe’s book. There are lot of convincing details. In fact, the details make the case against evolution much, much stronger.

Unfortunately, even after Behe presented in The Edge of Evolution the strong arguments based on hard evidence that DP could not possibly account for the amazing complex features of life, the theory lived on. Thankfully, Behe kept swatting the armored roach.

Mighty Blow #3: In Darwin Devolves, Behe shows that in real life DP doesn’t even move up the mountain. DP moves predictability, consistently, relentlessly down the mountain!

Behe does not deny that DP can and does sometimes take a very short step up the mountain of biological complexity. But for every short step up, DP takes many steps down the mountain. That’s right. The very same processes (random variation and natural selection) that are supposed to be able to increase functional complexity in real life consistently and relentlessly decreases genetic information. Behe demonstrates this by once again using research on real life examples.

Interestingly, one of the examples Behe uses is Darwin’s famous finches. Darwin noticed that finches on the Galapagos islands had developed differences in their beaks that allowed them to survive better in different situations. Some species had longer, pointier beaks, others had shorter, thicker beaks. Only recently has the ability to process the genomes of creatures relatively quickly allowed detailed research to discover what caused the beaks to change. Did the birds produce new, complex proteins? Or perhaps new amazing beak forming molecular machinery? No. Damaged genes caused pointy beaks to become shorter and thicker. During droughts this was actually an advantage since the thicker beaks could more easily crack the kinds of tougher seeds that were an important food source during a drought.

It’s not just finches where DP operated by breaking genes and degrading proteins. The same is true for polar bears, bacteria, and other examples that Behe gives. In fact, Behe makes strong arguments that DP always will work this way. Mutations that degrade biological information, damage proteins, and break regulatory elements are sometimes helpful to organisms. Damaging mutations are so massively more common and easy for DP to produce that DP consistently and relentlessly drives organism down the mountain of biological complexity, not up it.

 

Not convinced? Why should you be based on my meager effort to summarize three whole books written by a brilliant biochemist in one short blog post written by just me? Read Behe’s books. Decide for yourself.

So what (or Who!) can produce amazing irreducibly complex things?

Living things are not the only place we find amazing examples of irreducibly complex things. Other examples include airplanes, laptops, car engines, and nuclear submarines (I served on nuclear submarines and wrote a blog post comparing living cells to nuclear submarines). In every case, these complex objects are the work of an intelligent designer.

Intelligent Design theory only goes so far. Based on both every day observations of nature and also on rigorous scientific reasoning, we can confidently conclude that life is the work of a great, ancient Intelligent Designer. But science can’t tell us who that Designer is. I thank God that the Designer has revealed Himself to us through prophets, apostles, and above all, through His Son Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory!

(The review I wrote for Amazon on Darwin Devolves may be found below.)

Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others . . .

*******

The Review I wrote for Darwin Devolves on Amazon

If, like me, you loved Behe’s first two books, Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution, you’ll love this one as well. If you hated them, well, you may want to stop by the drug store and get some extra antacid medicine before you start reading.

If you have not read those two previous books, I would recommend reading them first. Although it’s possible to jump into the arguments with Darwin Devolves, in some ways this book does build on the previous ones. And while I feel this in another excellent book, if I had to pick just one to read, I would recommend Darwin’s Black Box.

As before, Behe combines clear thinking with witty and skillful writing to examine the claim that Darwinian processes can account for the complex features in life. It’s no surprise that he shows they cannot.

While this book is mostly focused on scientific data and reasoning, Behe does not shy away from the philosophical and even theological underpinnings and implications of this topic. In fact, those implications are the very purpose of the book. In his own words, Behe explains the book’s goal as follow:

[There are] . . . just two general mutually exclusive views: (1) contemporary nature, including people, is an accident; and (2) contemporary nature, especially people, is largely intended – the product of a preexisting reasoning mind.

                I will argue in this book that recent progress in our understanding of the molecular foundation of life decisively supports the latter view. (pp. 1-2)

Behe succeeds brilliantly in arguing that life is the work of an Intelligent Designer.

If you’ve read his previous books, you may be wondering what this book adds. It doesn’t feel like it, but it’s been more than 11 years since the Edge of Evolution was published, and more than 20 years since Darwin’s Black Box. Due to advances in scientific techniques, new data is available and Behe focuses on this new data (but not exclusively).

Specifically, hard data from a number of studies shows that the Darwinian mechanism of random variation and natural selection consistently and relentlessly drives life in the opposite direction of what molecules-to-man evolution requires. The very mechanism that is supposed to build up life, when examined at the most foundational level of information in genes and proteins in cells, consistently degrades it. That’s surprising. I think even Behe was somewhat surprised by the extent to which this is now seen to be true. Behe’s conclusion is not based on vague philosophizing, but on hard data from multiple experiments.

In addition to the magnificent chapters explaining and analyzing this scientific data, Behe includes chapters which are more philosophical. While the scientific chapters are magnificent, imho the philosophical material is merely great. This is not surprising since Behe is a biochemist. But he proves that a biochemist can do a pretty good job with philosophy as well!

I think that every chapter is worth reading. But if you’re really pressed for time, you could start roughly half way through the book at Part 3, chapter 6 and read through the end and you would get the majority of the new, main points Behe is making. If there is one weakness (I think it is a mild one) it is that the first chapters seem to move a little slow and it seems to take a little longer than necessary to get to the meat of the book.

I recommend the book to everyone interested in the intelligent design vs. evolution debate. Even if you’re on the evolution side, you owe it so yourself to read the best, most current arguments for intelligent design. That would certainly include this book!