Michael J. Behe > Quotes

“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.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What’s more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so.”
― Michael J. Behe

“The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed.”
― Michael J. Behe

“Is the conclusion that the universe was designed - and that the design extends deeply into life - science, philosophy, religion, or what? In a sense it hardly matters. By far the most important question is not what category we place it in, but whether a conclusion is true. A true philosophical or religious conclusion is no less true than a true scientific one. Although universities might divide their faculty and courses into academic categories, reality is not obliged to respect such boundaries.”
― Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism

“Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age.”
― Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism

“The result of these 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.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“intelligence is detected by perceiving a purposeful arrangement of parts. That is the way, the only way, that we can discern the existence of other minds and their intelligence.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution

“What can the theory account for? If it can’t explain even color patterns, how much has it been exaggerated? Quite a bit, it turns out. To see the problem more clearly, let’s first think about studies of human nutrition. For decades the public was told to avoid foods with a lot of cholesterol. Recently, however, a government panel changed its mind, saying there’s no evidence that’s harmful. Here’s the problem for grand claims about evolution. Science can’t tell if cholesterol is bad for modern humans, who can be studied in great detail. Yet if that’s too hard, then how can science claim to know what affected plants and animals in the distant past? Ones that can’t be studied in real time like people? Ones that encountered myriad environmental influences over millions of years? That’s easy to answer: Science can’t and doesn’t know”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution

“If nutritionists can’t easily determine how one dietary factor affects human health, evolutionary biologists can’t tell what affected the survival of long dead animals.”
― Michael J. Behe

“In fact, none of the papers published in the JME over the entire course of its life as a journal has ever proposed a detailed model by which a complex biochemical system might have been produced in a gradual, step-by-step Darwinian fashion. Although many scientists ask how sequences can change or how chemicals necessary for life might be produced in the absence of cells, no one has ever asked in the pages of JME such questions as the following: How did the photosynthetic reaction center develop? How did intramolecular transport start? . . . The very fact that none of these problems is even addressed, let alone solved, is a very strong indication that Darwinism is an inadequate framework for understanding the origin of complex biochemical systems.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“will discuss molecular machines that allow cells to swim, and you will see what is required for them to do so.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“I concluded that I had been led to believe in Darwin’s theory not because of strong evidence for it. Rather, it was for sociological reasons—that simply was the way educated people were expected to think these days.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution

“In 2001 Science featured an article, “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat,” that argued a low-fat diet is not necessarily healthful and that the public had been misled about the relative merits of fat and starch.16 A few years ago Scientific American declared: “It’s time to end the war on salt: the zealous drive by politicians to limit our salt intake has little basis in science.”17 About the same time the Department of Agriculture tossed out its iconic food pyramid for a food plate and juggled several of its recommendations.18 Recently the USDA was reported to be poised to recommend that Americans eat less meat—not because it’s better for individuals, but because it may be better for the environment, which indirectly could affect our health too.19”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges 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.”
― Michael Behe

“It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple.
A happy example is seen in the comic strip <>.
Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and travelling back in time, or <> himself into animal shapes, or using it as a <> and making clones of him-self. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work.
In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin.
For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly fom spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs). But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science detect what was really happening.
(...)
The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as <>. One of the chief advocates of the spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory.
From the limited view of cells that microscope provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a <> not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“The relevant steps in biological processes occur ultimately at the molecular level, so a satisfacatory explanation of a biological phenomenon--such as sight, digestion, or immunity--must include its molecular explanation.
Now that the black box of vision has been opened, it is no longer enough for an evolutionary explanation of that power to consider only the anatomical structures of whole eyes, as Darwin did in the nineteenth century (and as popularizers of evolution continue to do today).
Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“We are invited by Dawkins and Darwin to believe that the evolution of the eye proceeded step-by-step through a series of plausible intermediates in infinitesimal increments. But are they infinitesimal? Remember that the "light-sensitive spot" that Dawkins takes as his atarting point requires a cascade of factors, including 11-cis-retinal and rhodopsin, to function.
Dawkins doesn't mention them. And where did the "little cup" come from? A ball of cells--from which the cup must be made--will tend to be rounded unless held in the correct shape by molecular supports. In fact, there are dozens of complex proteins involved in mantaining cell shape, and dozens more that control extracellular structure; in their absence, cells take the shape of so many soap bubbles. Do these structures represent single-step mutations? Dawkins did not tell us how the apparently simple "cup" shape came to be. And although he reassures us that any "translucent material" would be an improvement (recall that Haeckel mistakenly thought it would be easy to produce cells since they were certainly just "simple lumps"), we are not told how difficult it is to produce a "simple lens". In short, Dawkins's explanation is only addressed to the level of what is called gross anatomy.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“Gratuitous affirmations of a dominant theory can mesmerize the unwary. They lull people into assuming that objectively difficult problems don’t really matter. That they’ve been solved already. Or will be solved soon. Or are unimportant. Or something. They actively distract readers from noticing an idea’s shortcomings. “Of course,” students are effectively prompted, “everyone knows what happened here—right? You’d be blind not to see it—right?” But the complacency isn’t the fruit of data or experiments. It comes from the powerful social force of everyone in the group nodding back, “Of course!”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution

“With only their eyes for tools, through no fault of their own, naturalists were stuck at the surface level of biology for thousands of years. Although dissection allowed some progress in understanding large-scale internal anatomy, it too was often misleading. For example, arteries and veins could be seen in dissected animal bodies. Yet the fact that they connected to each other through tiny capillaries in a closed circulatory system escaped even the great Roman surgeon Galen, who thought blood was pumped out by the heart to sink into the tissues, much as water in irrigation canals in his day sank into the ground. His mistaken ideas were taught for thirteen hundred years.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution

“The first way to know something is, of course, through personal experience. You know that your living room is painted green because you’ve been in your living room and saw that it was green. (I won’t worry here about things like how you know you aren’t dreaming or insane or such.) Similarly you know what a bird is, how gravity works (again, in an everyday sense), and how to get to the nearest shopping mall, all by direct experience.
The second way to know things is by authority. That is, you rely on some source of information, believing it to be reliable, when you have no experience of your own. So almost every person who has gone to school believes that the earth goes around the sun, even though very few people would be able to tell you how anybody could even detect that motion. You are relying on authority if, when asked if you know the way to San Jose, you answer yes and pull out a map. You might be able to personally test the map’s reliability by using it to navigate to San Jose, but until you do you are relying on authority. Many people believe democracy is superior to other forms of government even though they haven’t lived under any other type. They rely on the authority of textbooks and politicians, and perhaps on verbal or pictorial descriptions of what it’s like in other societies. Of course other societies do the same, and most of their defenders rely on authority.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple.
A happy example is seen in the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes".
Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and travelling back in time, or "transmogrifying" himself into animal shapes, or using it as a "duplicator" and making clones of him-self. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work.
In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin.
For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly fom spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs). But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science detect what was really happening.
(...)
The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as "simple". One of the chief advocates of the spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory.
From the limited view of cells that microscope provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a "simple lump of albuminous combination of carbon" not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“I suppose we both thought that, even if we didn’t know how undirected nature could begin life, somebody must know. That’s the impressive power of groupthink.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution

“Scientists working on the origin of life deserve a lot of credit; they have attacked the problem by experiment and calculation, as science should. And although the experiments have not turned out as many hoped, through their efforts we now have a clear idea of the staggering difficulties that would face an origin of life by natural chemical processes.
In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life.”
― Michael Behe

“(One common confusion of critics is to think that ID argues everything is planned. That’s not the case. Chance is an important, if superficial, feature of biology.)”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution

“A few years ago I read The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. I was startled by his claim that many modern American ideas actually have their roots in old European philosophies. In particular I was surprised that the song “Mack the Knife” was a translation of a German song, “Mackie Messer,” whose inspiration Bloom traces to a murderer’s “joy of the knife” that Nietzsche describes in Thus Spake Zarathrusta. Most of us like to think that our ideas are our own—or at least, if they were proposed by someone else, that we only agreed to them after conscious review and assent. It’s unnerving to think, as Bloom maintained, that many of our important ideas about the way the world works were simply picked up unreflectively from the cultural milieu in which we found ourselves.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“The king of Siam once asked his wise men for a proverb that would be appropriate for any occasion. They suggested "This, too, shall pass".
Well, in biochemistry an equally appropriate saying for all occasions is "Things are more complicated than they seem".”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“Wallace thought that much of nature showed strong evidence of purpose, as he forcefully conveyed in The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose.4 In other words, in modern parlance, the very cofounder of the theory of evolution was an intelligent-design proponent.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution

“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.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution