Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A biochemist responds to Behe's challenge, 23 Mar 1999
By A Customer
As a biochemist interested in DNA structures and the origins of complex systems, I was delighted to hear that someone in my area of research had written a book on this subject. Behe does a good job of trying to convey the problem. If anything, molecular systems are even MORE complex than detailed in his well written and wonder-filled descriptions. However, I was surprised and frustrated to find the use of poor logic and factual errors throughout the book. For example, Behe can't find articles that he LIKES about the molecular evolution of flagella, so he then proceeds to claim that these articles simply don't exist. There are entire textbooks with titles like "Molecular Evolution" (search Amazon.com and see for yourself), and yet Behe insists that nothing has been written on the subject, and concludes that the reason for this is because no one has been able to find any detailed evidence for molecular evolution.One of the examples cited of "irreducible complexity" is the bacterial flagellum. Behe claims that 40 proteins are necessary for a fully functional flagellum. Whilst this is true for E.coli, flagella in many bacteria are made from fewer proteins - for example, in the bacterium that causes syphilis (Treponema pallidum), there are a total of 38 flagellar proteins; in the bacterium that causes lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi), there are only 35 flagellar proteins; finally, in a bacteria associated with ulcers (Helicobacter pylori) there are only 33 proteins necessary to form complete, fully functional flagella. It is likely that as new bacterial genomes continue to be sequenced (at the rate of about one a month!), organisms will be found which require even fewer genes to make a completely functional flagella. So this "irreducible complex" of 40 proteins has shrunk to 33 proteins, in the past 2 years of research! Behe's argument is that EVERY ONE of the 40 proteins are necessary. Obviously 7 of those 40 aren't completely necessary. Maybe it's only 30 or perhaps even 20 proteins that are absolutely necessary? It's hard to say, but it is very dangerous to make such dogmatic statements as "this system is irreducibly complex", especially when the system is made up of proteins that have other normal functions in the cell, apart from flagella - such as the GTPase proteins. For a more fair treatment of the subject of flagella (and bacteria and molecular evolution in general), I can happily recommend reading "The Outer Reaches of Life", by John Postgate (also available through Amazon.com), which is an excellent treatise about bacteria written for the "non-scientific reader". Of course there is a need to explain the origins of biochemical complexity. But declaring "intelligent design by a miracle" to be this method is neither scientific nor helpful. I guess my advice would be similar to that of Huxley about Darwin's Origin of the Species - please read Behe's book and decide for yourself!
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31 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Biochemical evidence fatal to the evolutionary hypothesis, 3 Sep 1999
By A Customer
I found this book to be a remarkably thorough, dispassionate, readable, and proficient evaluation of essential criteria that an evolutionary theory must meet regarding the origins of life in order to continue to stand. Evolutionary theory hobbles itself by allowing only memoryless, purposeless, random processes to account for all life. Behe examines whether what we know about biochemistry can support such a postulate. He finds and shows that living molecular biochemical machinery is extremely, reemphasize extremely, complex, and cannot be made any simpler without destroying its function. Moreover, according to his rather comprehensive survey of the Biochemistry literature, no one out there has ever shown any simpler working way to make these machines, as a more "primitive" step in an evolutionary path to what now exists. They either only wave their hands and say it must have been so because evolution is true, or they make up simplistic, unrelated mathematical or mechanical structures that seem to gradually progress from simplicity to complexity, and use them to "prove" that the living biochemical world must have done so, without ever showing that the actual biochemical world ever did so or could ever do so by identifiable biochemical evolutionary steps. For example, he shows that the clotting mechanism is extremely complex, and must be so to work. The evolutionary theorists fail to ever show that there either could be or was a simpler way to handle clotting. If an attempt is mounted to make it simpler, clotting simply does not work and becomes lethal. All steps are essential. He repeats this demonstration for a number of biochemical systems.Speaking for myself, Behe comes as close as anyone I have ever read to presenting a formal disproof of the evolutionary hypothesis in connection with an aspect of life common to every living thing: biochemical cellular machinery. Evolution requires by its axioms gradual, not unavoidably sudden, increases in complexity. It has no way of explaining sudden, coordinated complexity. But the irreducible coordinated complexity of biochemistry in a cell makes the complexity of the Pentium III pale in comparison. The sudden appearance of such a phenomenal degree of complexity by chance processes is frankly not at all credible, rather has become an embarassment to those who propose it. And if evolutionary thought fails at this important juncture, then it fails altogether as a purely mechanistic hypothesis for the existence of life. I have never seen a proper rebuttal to this book. Those who criticize Behe, like some reviews here, seem to repeat the kind of blind, unscientific allegation he highlights in the book itself, almost as if they had not even read the book. I would be very interested in specific disproofs of the irreducible complexity of the actual biochemical machines and processes found in life. Until that time, this book, in my book, constitutes more than any other a formal disproof of the evolutionary hypothesis.
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14 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, 10 Mar 1998
By A Customer
Michael J. Behe does not attempt to prove the existence of God, or merely to repeat well-known scientific criticisms of the so-called "purposeless natural selection" or "pure" version of Darwinism. What Behe does is to demonstrate, with beauty as well as scientific rigor, that pure Darwinism fails as a scientific theory if even one organism has ever lived possessing a biological feature that is mathematically improbable within the organism's evolutionary time. There is nothing new in anecdotal observations made long ago that Darwinism has difficulty explaining the complexity of an eye, and of other biologically complex mechanisms. What is new here is that Behe presents an elegant, cogent, and persuasive general proof that Darwinism is not only motivated by anti-theistic philosophy, but in fact is not scientifically plausible. Behe does not attempt to turn this into a denial of evolution or natural selection, although he is entirely correct in pointing out that no chance mutation has ever produced a sustainable new species in a scientific experiment, even among microbiological species with extremely rapid reproduction rates. Rather, Behe succeeds in proving that "purposeless natural selection" is so mathematically improbable that it fails as a scientific theory.
An important corollary of Behe's book, which no one seems to have noted, is its implications for belief in the probable existence of so-called "intelligent" life elsewhere in the universe (by which one actually means "reflective" life, since intelligence is present in varying degrees in animals and machines). Even if one were to conclude that human life is a purposeless chance mutation, notwithstanding the mathematical absurdity of such a conclusion, Behe demonstrates that the odds are extremely high (rather than extremely low as Carl Sagan and others have argued) that human life is unique in the universe. Thus Behe's proof lays bare the nature of both pure Darwinism, and of what one might salaciously call "Carl Saganism", as forms of paganistic religious faith or philosophical systems rather than well-informed science.
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