Michael Behe

The L.A. Times has a very good article by Josh Getlin on Lehigh University biochemist and author of Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe.

The entire article is both fair and interesting, but here are a couple items worthy of special note:

"Behe does not convince me in the slightest," said Michael Ruse, a Florida State University philosophy professor who wrote "The Evolution-Creation Struggle" and is in the Darwinian camp. "But he's a genial, personable guy, and he comes across as a very serious man. I don't think you can dismiss him as a crank. He is a real scientist."

Although most scientists dismiss Behe, they make a big mistake if they try to demonize him, Ruse added: "We tend to think these people favoring intelligent design are all evil people, and they're not. That's the trouble on my side. Our opponents come in different shapes and sizes, and Michael is proof of that."

Some in the media consistently do what Ruse warns against. They seek to portray anyone as a nut who thinks the Intelligent Design people are on to something important. In order to do that successfully, though, they have to mine quotations from laymen and fundamentalist pastors. When people like Behe and Scott Minnich are questioned about ID the media folk are flummoxed. The leaders of the ID movement just don't fit the stereotype of hicks and yokels that the media wants us to believe comprise the movement.

Evolutionary theory, which gained prominence in the 19th century, is based on scientific evidence that life on Earth has evolved through a process of natural selection and random mutations, with no supernatural plan or purpose.

Note the last prepositional phrase. This is precisely why people like the Dover school board members wanted a little balance in the classroom. Those six words are pure religion. There's absolutely no scientific evidence anywhere that life on Earth has no supernatural plan or purpose, nor can there be. Yet statements like this are perfectly acceptable in high school classrooms, but the contrary of such claims is not. The reader will be forgiven if he or she is beginning to think that the battle in Dover is not over the respective roles of science and religion but rather over whether atheism (or agnosticism) will be permitted to remain the official religious view in our kids' classrooms.

Behe has written one of the few books on intelligent design to reach a mass audience, "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," and is finishing a sequel.

That a sequel is on the way is great news. Not only will a follow-up volume enrich Behe, it'll much more importantly, both to him and to us, also enrich the public discourse on a very important issue. We look forward to its release.