Michael Behe
Michael Behe
Michael J. Beheis an American biochemist, author, and intelligent designadvocate. He serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Behe is best known for his argument for his stance on irreducible complexity, which argues that some biochemical structures are too complex to be explained by known evolutionary mechanisms and are therefore probably the result of intelligent design. Behe has testified in several court cases...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
Evolution no longer looks like a random process to me; it looks like a set-up job. My sense is that we'll discover the means to detect the design scientifically.
Intelligent design relies on physical, empirical, observable evidence from nature plus logical inferences.
Creationism is a theological concept but intelligent design is a scientific theory. One can be a creationist without any physical evidence. That's 180 degrees different from intelligent design.
The National Academy of Sciences treats intelligent design in a way what I consider utterly misleading. Talk about scholarly malfeasance!
The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism - it is intelligent design.
We are not inferring design to account for a black box, but to account for an open box.
The conclusion of design flows naturally from the data; we should not shrink from it; we should embrace it and build on it.
Because of the immense publicity that's mushroomed around this issue in the past six months, more people are getting emotional about the topic. And it's generally not on my side.
Many systems in the cell show signs of purposeful intelligent design. What science has discovered in the cell in the past 50 years is poorly explained by a gradual theory such as Darwin's.
The fact that most biology texts act more as cheerleaders for Darwin's theory rather than trying to develop the critical faculties of their students shows the need, I think, for such statements.
That was a real drag. I think he really went way over what he as a judge is entitled to say.
When you start putting constraints on science, science suffers.
The question of how the eye works - that is, what happens when a photon of light first impinges on the retina - simply could not be answered at that time.
But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.