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
are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory.
It's the nature of bureaucracy, I think, to issue statements like this.
It was a real disappointment. It's hard to say this chills the atmosphere, because if you're publicly known as an ID supporter, you can already kiss your tenure chances goodbye. It doesn't help.
Creationism is a theological concept but intelligent design is a scientific theory. One can be a creationist without any physical evidence. That's 180 degrees different from intelligent design.
scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.
That was a real drag. I think he really went way over what he as a judge is entitled to say.
This continues the venerable Darwinian tradition of making grandiose claims based on piddling results. There is nothing in the paper that an ID proponent would think was beyond random mutation and natural selection. In other words, it is a straw man.
Although I find it congenial to think that it's God, others might prefer to think it's an alien or who knows? An angel, or some satanic force, some new age power.
The National Academy of Sciences treats intelligent design in a way what I consider utterly misleading. Talk about scholarly malfeasance!
Because of the immense publicity that's mushroomed around this issue in the past six months, more people are getting emotional about the topic. And it's generally not on my side.
Many systems in the cell show signs of purposeful intelligent design. What science has discovered in the cell in the past 50 years is poorly explained by a gradual theory such as Darwin's.
The result of [the] cumulative efforts to investigate the cell to investigate life at the molecular level is a loud, clear, piercing cry of 'design!' The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur, and Darwin. The observation of the intelligent design of life is as momentous as the observation that the earth goes around the sun.
Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.
In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.