Michael Behe
Michael Behe
Michael J. Beheis an American biochemist, author, and intelligent designadvocate. He serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Behe is best known for his argument for his stance on irreducible complexity, which argues that some biochemical structures are too complex to be explained by known evolutionary mechanisms and are therefore probably the result of intelligent design. Behe has testified in several court cases...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.
For example, both humans and chimps have a broken copy of a gene that in other mammals helps make vitamin C. ... It's hard to imagine how there could be stronger evidence for common ancestry of chimps and humans. ... Despite some remaining puzzles, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin had this point right, that all creatures on earth are biological relatives.
Throughout history there have been many other examples, similar to that of Haeckel, Huxley and the cell, where a key piece of a particular scientific puzzle was beyond the understanding of the age.
Thus it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life could easily be produced from inanimate material.
We are not inferring design to account for a black box, but to account for an open box.
It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed.
Many people, including many important and well-respected scientists, just don't want there to be anything beyond nature. They don't want a supernatural being to affect nature.
In order to say that some function is understood, every relevant step in the process must be elucidated.
In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines.
The conclusion of design flows naturally from the data; we should not shrink from it; we should embrace it and build on it.
In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.
The strong appearance of design [in nature] allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.
Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical reactions necessary for life.
Although Darwin was able to persuade much of the world that a modern eye could be produced gradually from a much simpler structure, he did not even attempt to explain how the simple light sensitive spot that was his starting point actually worked.