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With his characteristically impish grin breaking through a full beard, Behe flashed on the screen a diagram of the humble mousetrap, his trademark illustration of "irreducible complexity." After pointing out the five parts necessary for mousetrap function, he added, "You need all the parts to catch a mouse. You can't catch a few mice with a platform, then add the spring and catch a few more, and then add the hammer and improve its function. All the parts must be there to have any function at all. The mousetrap is irreducibly complex."

Behe was suddenly a tour guide, piloting his listeners on a theme park ride through the cell and pointing out systems that exhibited this eerie mousetrap kind of complexity. Using photos and diagrams, he walked through the chemical chain reaction that gives rise to vision and detailed the elegant but complex structure of the whiplike cilium with which many kinds of cells are equipped. Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes cartoons punctuated the lecture, and even an outlandish Rube Goldberg contraption—the "Mosquito Bite Scratcher"—was displayed as an analogy to the complicated mechanism by which blood clots form.

"The cell is no longer a mysterious black box as it was for Darwin," Behe continued; "we now know precisely how it works at the molecular level. And the cell is chock full of systems like these that are irreducibly complex."

Finally, he showed a New Yorker cartoon with a professor being confronted in his office by his department chairman and by a hit man who is screwing a silencer onto his gun. The caption reads, "Surely, professor, you knew when you took this position, it is publish or perish!"

His listeners relished the humor, but the mood in the room turned serious as Behe made his point:

As you search the professional literature of the last several decades, looking for articles that have been published even attempting to explain the possible Darwinian step-by-step origin of any of these systems, you will encounter a thundering silence. Absolutely no one—not one scientist—has published any detailed proposal or explanation of the possible evolution of any such complex biochemical system. And when a science does not publish, it ought to perish.

In short, Behe said, modern evolutionary theory, applying Darwin's own test, flunks spectacularly at the molecular level. Rather, everywhere we look inside the cell, evidence is staring scientists in the face that suggests the systems were directly designed by an intelligent agent.

Michael Behe is the father of six children, three boys and three girls ranging in age from two through eleven, with a seventh on the way. No wall of separation stands between his fathering and his writing about biochemistry. He weaves into many of his chapters homey images drawn from the Behes' family room at 2258 Apple Street. For example, the joyous task of assembling his son's tricycle on Christmas Day illustrates the importance of detailed instructions in living systems. Putting together snap-lock beads and Tinkertoys with his kids on the family-room rug provides pictures of how organic molecules are built. His youngest daughter's dolly wagon is pressed into service to help explain how antibodies latch onto the body's invaders. Behe, the master-teacher, can hardly make a point without bringing in something familiar and concrete, such as tuna cans, an elephant, chocolate cake, and even "roadkill."

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April 28 1997, Vol. 41, No. 5