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Even as a child, Mike Behe says, he was a "science enthusiast." He excelled as a high-school student, graduating fifth in a class of 200 and being elected senior class president. Recalling his Catholic high-school science classes, he says, "I was taught that God made the laws of the universe and that some of those laws led to evolutionary processes. Therefore, God is no less a creator just because he uses the laws he set in motion."

To Behe, evolution was never a point of contention until he reached Philadelphia's Drexel University in the early 1970s. He vividly recalls an odd conversation with a fellow student who used evolution as a "tool to fight religion." Behe argued vigorously with this campus skeptic for the theistic position on evolution; but when the dust of battle had settled, neither had converted the other. In 1974, Behe graduated from Drexel with a degree in chemistry and an education in the uses of Darwinism for propaganda in the hands of atheists.

For his doctoral studies, Behe moved across town to the University of Pennsylvania. There he plugged away for four years and, after completing his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1978, attained an appointment to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

One of his colleagues in the genetics laboratory at the National Institutes of Health was a fellow Catholic biochemist, Jo Ann Nichols. Rarely did their work touch on evolution, but Behe recalls one day when the issue did arise, as a matter of joint speculation between them during a break. The question was this: "If the first life did arise by random naturalistic processes from a chemical soup, as all textbooks are saying, what exactly are the minimum systems that are required for life?" Together they ticked off a mental list of the minimum requirements: a functioning membrane, a system to build the DNA units, a system to control the copying of DNA, a system for energy processing. Suddenly, they broke off their speculation, looked at each other, and smiled, jointly muttering, "Naaah—too many systems; it couldn't have happened by chance."

In 1982, Behe was hired by Queens College in New York City to teach biochemistry. He looks back on the three years at Queens as a high point of his life, primarily for what happened outside the lab and the classroom. It was while living in Queens that he met his wife, Celeste, a bright, attractive young woman with jet-black hair who had grown up in an Italian Catholic family. After a three-month courtship, Michael proposed, and they were married the following summer.

Three years later, not wishing to raise his family in an urban setting, he began to look elsewhere. When a position opened at Lehigh, an hour north of Philadelphia in Bethlehem, he applied and was brought onto the faculty in 1985, receiving tenure two years later.

It was shortly after his tenure was granted that he experienced the first major intellectual shock concerning evolution when he ordered the controversial book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by agnostic geneticist Michael Denton.

As Behe opened the book, he found himself pulled in by Denton's radical scientific critique, which, while agreeing that "microevolution" is an established fact that no one denies, challenges the really significant claim of Darwinism—that it has explained "macroevolution." Denton, who now researches human genetics at Otago University in New Zealand, and is not himself a creationist, defines macroevolution as the emergence of wholly new organs or organisms by purely naturalistic processes that work in small increments. Having evaluated the evidence for macroevolution and found it wanting, Denton concludes: "The Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the Twentieth Century."

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April 28 1997, Vol. 41, No. 5