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Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
By Michael J. Behe
Free Press
307 pp.; $25, hardcover

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.

—Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species

To Darwin, the cell was a "black box"—its inner workings were utterly mysterious to him. Now, the black box has been opened up and we know how it works. Applying Darwin's test to the ultra-complex world of molecular machinery and cellular systems that have been discovered over the past 40 years, we can say that Darwin's theory has "absolutely broken down."

—Michael Behe, biochemist and author of Darwin's Black Box

During the fall of 1996, a series of cultural earthquakes shook the secular world with the publication of a revolutionary new book, Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. The reviewer in the New York Times Book Review praised Behe's deft analogies and delightfully whimsical style, and took sober note of the book's radical challenge to Darwinism. Newspapers and magazines from Vancouver to London, including Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and several of the world's leading scientific journals, reported strange tremors in the world of evolutionary biology. The Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly newspaper read primarily by university professors and administrators, did a feature story on the author two months after his book appeared. The eye-catching headline read, "A Biochemist Urges Darwinists to Acknowledge the Role Played by an 'Intelligent Designer.' "

Now reporters are making their pilgrimage to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to interview the author at the center of these quakes: 44-year-old Lehigh University biochemist Michael J. Behe (pronounced "bee-hee").

Behe, who typically sports a lumberjack shirt, jeans, and black Adidas sneakers, toils long hours with his students in the biochemistry lab, doing research on DNA and the structure of proteins. He is short, balding, and has thick, dark-rimmed glasses; he looks as much like a hardware-store clerk as a scientific renegade.

Seated at a lab table, surrounded by bottles filled with clear, smelly fluids designed to rearrange DNA sequences, he explains that advances in his own field—where scientists have been furiously unraveling the mysteries of exactly how cells work—have yielded a startling finding: Molecular machinery and complex systems in the cell are dependent upon far too many interconnected parts to have been built up gradually, step by tiny step, over time.

With his book already in its eighth printing, Behe finds his calendar filling up with speaking engagements. In a recent trip to the University of South Florida in Tampa, he spoke to biologists, students, and schoolteachers who had braved rains from an approaching hurricane to hear him.

In his talk, Behe quickly reviewed the modern theory of evolution and then flashed onto a screen his favorite quote by Darwin from The Origin of Species (see p. 15), acknowledging the kind of evidence that would be necessary to refute the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Behe took up the challenge of Darwin's test and asked, "What type of biological system could not be formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications? Well, for starters, a system that has a quality that I call irreducible complexity."

Encouraging the nonscientists in the audience to stay tuned, Behe explained briefly what he meant by the phrase "When I say that something is irreducibly complex, I simply mean it is a system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."

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April 28 1997, Vol. 41, No. 5