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Home > 2008 > March (Web-only)Christianity Today, March (Web-only), 2008  |   |  
Review
At Origins' Margins
Michael Behe wonders how much Darwinism can really explain.



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The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism
By Michael Behe
Free Press, 2007 (also available in audio, paperback available in June)

Would an infinite number of Darwinians, working at for an indefinite period of time, eventually prove a single instance of evolution producing a new species?

Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of science and committed Darwinian, confesses in his book, Living with Darwin, that if Darwinians "were to try experimenting on the natural selection of organisms with relatively long generation times it would take the lives of thousands of successive investigators to provide even the slightest chance of even the first steps toward experimental success." Living with Darwin, it turns out, takes a lot more commitment than most people realize.

Materialists do not accept an afterlife, of course, but they do believe in an infinite amount of time, and they surmise that given enough time, anything — including life as we know it — can happen. (Thus, it is famously postulated, infinite monkeys at infinite keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare.) This argument runs into an empirical wall with the big bang, which limits the amount of time for life to develop to about 15 billion years. It also has the theoretical problem that long stretches of time do not make impossibilities more possible. A lot of time does make improbabilities more probable, but multiplying time does not guarantee that long sequences of improbabilities will actually occur.

Biology certainly has a lot to say about the role of luck in the evolution of life, but the question of how much luck evolution needs and how much luck nature provides to get the ball of life rolling has been as much a matter of philosophical and mathematical speculation as empirical observation. Only in the past few decades has the state of genetic research reached the point where an informed judgment about the probabilities presupposed by Darwinism can be made. Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge of Evolution, should establish the precedent for future debates. Darwinists will appeal Behe's verdict, no doubt, but for readers with an open mind, it will be hard to overturn.

Darwinists are imaginative when it comes to speculating about the possible pathways that connect the stages of evolutionary development. Behe demonstrates how these theoretical constructions run into too many roadblocks in the real world of genetics. Rather than demolish Darwinism, however, Behe wants to explore its limits. He acknowledges that scientists can follow the lineage of all creatures back to a common ancestor. He also acknowledges that Darwinian theory can account for some aspects of the development of new species. He just doesn't think that random mutation and natural selection are an exhaustively complete description of the path life has taken.

Behe's previous book, Darwin's Black Box, argued that some cases of design in nature are too elegant to have been produced by chance. His critics attacked him on two fronts. First, they suspected that his talk of intelligent design was merely a ruse for getting God back into public education. In other words, they impugned his motives, which is always a sign of rhetorical desperation. Even if his motives are suspect, his arguments should be examined on their own terms. Moreover, Behe is not afraid to offend all parties of the evolution debate. He accepts the common ancestry of chimps and humans, and he thinks there is no theological problem in imagining God working through the secondary causes posited by Darwin. Behe's position is hardly designed for easy use in the culture wars.





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[Reader Reviews]
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 73 comments.See all comments
Sylvilagus   Posted: March 27, 2008 8:17 PM
I find it strange that the review proceeds to promote the power and rigor of Behe's thought without ever delving into the question of whether his claims are even true. I'm certainly no expert in Behe's field, but I read widely enough as a layman to understand how much of Behe's book was disproved even before he ever wrote it. I am also certainly no enemy of Christianity, so I ask the following question sincerely and out of genuine concern: Should we not first and foremost be concerned with TRUTH? No matter how comforting a position like Behe's might be for those who find evolution difficult to reconcile to reconcile with their theology, surely we don't want to justify ourselves through ignorance or deception. I find it difficult to read this review as anything other than a willful attempt to ignore the hard truths in favor of the easy lie, and that is deeply disappointing for a man of faith.

Joe McFaul   Posted: March 27, 2008 3:28 PM
"Would an infinite number of Darwinians, working at for an indefinite period of time, eventually prove a single instance of evolution producing a new species?" That's a really odd quote to lead off this review. It's so *wrong* as to be apalling. New species are created every day and can be created nearly at will. A .000002 second google seach proves how just flatly wrong this is. I can select from a vast number of articles describing observed instances of speciation, but this one will do: http://www.ndsu.edu/instruct/mcclean/plsc431/chromnumber/number7.htm The rest of the review is downhill from there.

Bennett   Posted: March 27, 2008 3:59 PM
While you can say that every hypothesis in science has not or cannot be tested, EVERY THEORY HAS BEEN TESTED AGAIN AND AGAIN. This is the definition of a theory. It has been tested and the data collected generally support--and at the least do not deny--the hypothesis that is being tested. Theories strive to offer an explanation for what is going on. Laws (in science) on the other hand do not attempt to explain things. They simply express/describe what has always been observed to happen under certain circumstances. You may say, "Man cannot create life." But if you regard a virus as alive, it has already been done. A polio virus has been assembled (from its constituent molecules) which will infect mice and reproduce itself. Within the next few months there is a high probability that someone will turn on a bacterium with an assembled set of DNA. If your religion cannot deal with these things, you are about to have a problem.

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