Michael Behe, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, admits that he went through all his school years believing that Darwinian evolution explained what we see in biology only because his instructors told him that it did and the academic atmosphere did not allow for any challenge. After he joined the faculty of Lehigh University, he came across a study that offered convincing arguments against Darwinian Theory. Somewhat disturbed for being fooled for so many years, he ran laboratory tests that indicated that Darwin’s hypothesis could not adequately explain the complexity of nature.
Prof. Behe had an enormous advantage over the earlier naturalists because of the vast explosion of knowledge on the cell, life’s most fundamental unit, during the last half of the twentieth century. Powerful technologies revealed elaborate microscopic worlds inside the cell including a variety of molecular machines, carrying things from one end of the cell to the other, much like traffic on a busy city street, except the biological machines are irreducibly complex. One machine, the bacterial flagellum, functions and looks like an outboard motor and has 40 moving parts. If any part is missing, the machine effectiveness is not just reduced; it does not work at all. To assume that these irreducibly complex machines could develop by “numerous, successive, slight modifications” as Darwin demanded is not realistic. Furthermore, according to Darwin’s natural selection, an organism rejects variations that are useless in helping it survive and preserves those that do. But could Darwin’s small, favorable variations produce a bacterial flagellum? Unless the flagellum is completely assembled and actually works, natural selection cannot preserve it, and it cannot be passed on to the next generation. Therefore, Behe concluded that natural selection could not explain the origin of the bacterial flagellum or any other irreducibly complex biological system. Instead, all his research pointed to Intelligent Design (I.D.).
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