The other day, as we looked ahead to this week’s 30th anniversary of the publication Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, a friend confided to me, “My take on Behe and Darwin’s Black Box is shared by most in the intelligent design community, I think: Dr. Behe, in the sweep of human history, will certainly, CERTAINLY, go down as one of the greatest scientists of all time, up there with Newton, Kepler, Boyle, Watson and Crick, Einstein, etc.”
I answered, “You could be right, but isn’t it too soon to tell? Saying that could be seen as over the top, and could even be slightly embarrassing to Mike. He’s a modest guy.” Behe is also shy, as he says of himself in this clip from the documentary Revolutionary Behe:
I’m certain if he were editing a description of himself and came across the comparison with Newton, et al., he would strike it out.
Really So Outlandish?
And yet, I thought afterward, is that really so outlandish? It’s not unlike the comparison that George Gilder drew in a National Review round-up of the hundred most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. I mentioned this yesterday: the book, Gilder said, “overthrows Darwin at the end of the twentieth century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning.”
If you overthrow Darwin, that puts you in some pretty exalted company — even if the overthrow wasn’t performed singlehandedly. As a revolutionary, Behe drew on his own biochemical observations of irreducible complexity, but as he says in the documentary, he was also strongly influenced by geneticist Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. (The latter recently celebrated its 40th anniversary.)
In the clip from the documentary, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson recalls about the release of Darwin’s Black Box: “It was reviewed everywhere: the New York Times, National Review, Nature, technical science journals, popular publications. The term itself, irreducible complexity, entered the lexicon where it’s still very alive. It’s become part of the scientific descriptive toolkit.” That itself is revolutionary.
A Devilish Problem
Stephen Meyer explains the devilish problem Behe set for the evolutionists with the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellar motor. The problem has never been solved outside of the discourse of intelligent design, and looks less and less like it ever will be:
Natural selection selects or favors variations that confer a functional advantage on a system. Many of the simpler versions that you could imagine of the bacterial flagellar motor perform no function at all. So if you imagine trying to build a flagellar motor, adding parts one by one until you finally get to the complete system, you’re going to encounter configurations of parts that confer no function, in which the motor simply will not work, at which point the evolutionary process will terminate. It will cease to continue because the system conferring no function will not be preserved and passed on to the next generation.
The title of Darwin’s Black Box refers, of course, to the fact that Charles Darwin could not peer inside the cell to see the wonders of microbiology, to view structures like the bacterial flagellum. The cell for him was a black box. He was, in that sense, blind — and the blindness was the condition in which he formulated his theory, which continues to bear that mark. Open the box, as science ultimately did, and a revolution occurs.