For science and culture alike, something very important happened on August 2, 1996. Today, to be precise, is the 30th anniversary of the publication of biochemist Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, which has framed much of the debate about evolution versus intelligent design ever since.
Most iconically of all, Behe gave us there the irreducibly complex bacterial flagellum. Right away, the flagellum hit the fan. John West had a great conversation with him recently about what came next.
“Standing Up for the Truth”
As Dr. West remarks, the ensuing “bogus attacks” on Behe and on ID failed: “A lot of them have fallen by the wayside because science has progressed and our scientists were right. Mike Behe’s work is a prime example of that. And I think we should all thank Mike for standing up for the truth.”
West recounts the “three strikes” from the design critics — delivered against Behe’s three major works (Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves) — that have all struck out. I imagine that the author of those milestones must have tired by now of being vindicated, over and over. As West puts it, “They came up to bat against you, and you won. You won.”
Would You Have Predicted It?
I played a very small relevant role back in 1996: as the literary editor at National Review, I solicited a review of Darwin’s Black Box from prominent University of Chicago microbiologist James A. Shapiro. While rejecting the positive case for ID, Dr. Shapiro praised the book as a “valuable critique of an all-too-often unchallenged orthodoxy.”
National Review would go on to hail Darwin’s Black Box as one of the hundred most important nonfiction books of the century. Behe, as George Gilder wrote there, “overthrows Darwin at the end of the twentieth century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning.”
Time Magazine admitted:
Darwin’s Black Box helped to launch the Intelligent Design movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design, beyond Darwinian randomness. Today, with the movement stronger than ever, Michael J. Behe updates the book with an important new Afterword on the state of the debate.
The New York Times Book Review stated factually,
When examined with the powerful tools of modern biology, but not with its modern prejudices, life on a biochemical level can be a product, Behe says, only of intelligent design. Coming from a practicing biologist. . . this proposition is close to heretical.
He Who May Not Be Named
Much of Michael Behe’s thinking has been absorbed into discussions of evolution by scientists who are emphatically not pro-ID — even though “like Voldemort,” as Behe tells John West, “ID folks are people whose names you cannot say in the scientific literature.”
ID scientists are more honest and forthcoming in recognizing Behe by name. I interacted with a few about him this past week, and we’ll hear from more over the coming week.
Casey Luskin noted an almost brand-new preprint paper at bioRxiv, “The last bacterial common ancestor encoded a complex flagellum,” that is like a 30th anniversary gift to Michael Behe. “This is a big deal for design arguments,” said Dr. Luskin, “because if the flagellum is that old then there’s no way that something like an injectosome or type 3 secretory system could have been a precursor to it.”
A Bookend to Thirty Years
Onsi Fakhouri welcomed the same paper. “These paragraphs are amazing,” he told me:
This reconstruction supports a “complexity-first” model of flagellar evolution from the LBCA onward. Instead of emerging as a minimal scaffold that was progressively elaborated within Bacteria, the bacterial flagellum appears to have already existed in the LBCA as a complex system whose descendants were later modified by differential retention, loss, and lineage-specific innovation. This view is consistent with the “big bang” model, in which major evolutionary transitions are marked by the early emergence of comparatively complex biological systems, followed by a slower subsequent period of refinement. Therefore, increased flagellar complexity may have provided early bacterial lineages with an important ecological advantage, enhancing their ability to explore diverse environments and contributing to the long-term persistence of flagellated descendants. Subsequent flagellar evolution appears to have been dominated primarily by secondary loss and lineage-specific innovation…
In addition to defining a broadly conserved 40-gene core, pairwise co-presence recaptured known functional modules, including the export apparatus, stator, rod, hook, filament, and several regulatory circuits (Supplementary Figure 1). Each core module remains recognizable across deep bacterial divergence, indicating that much of the flagellum’s functional organization was established early and subsequently retained. This suggests that the ancestral flagellum was not only complex, but already organized into semi-independent functional units that could be differentially modified. [Emphasis added.]
Fakhouri said, “As best we can tell, as far back as we can infer, the flagellum is not only irreducibly complex, but also organized around a clean modular architecture. What an amazing literature result to bookend the first 30 years” of Behe’s book. Indeed.
Others had more personal recollections of the impact of Darwin’s Black Box. Dr. Howard Glicksman came upon the book in 2000, “after having heard Charles Thaxton talk about ID. I remember being mesmerized. It was what inspired me to start writing about how the human body works to show that we were intelligently designed,” as Glicksman did most recently in Your Amazing Body.
Physicist Robert Sheldon, among the scientists featured in The Story of Everything, remembered something Dante-esque:
My own encounter came just as I was trying to start a career as a university researcher at a public university. It opened up a view on science and religion that gave a place for God in the university. It showed a dimly lit path through the dark forest of academia, and gave me hope that I could do the same in space plasma physics.
It didn’t turn out that way. Instead, there were special sessions at AGU (American Geophysical Union) meetings attacking ID and the Dover trial was yet to come. I was fired in 2000 for teaching a science-and-faith course at UAH [University of Alabama in Huntsville]. But I remember the hope that this book stirred in me. Hope that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, hope that academia was not impenetrable, hope that there was a solution beside the utter rejection of science itself.
How Darwin’s Black Box affected another scientist, the amazing German paleontologist Günter Bechly, is nothing less than a legend and a parable. But that is a story to be recalled here on another day.