Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution by Kenneth R. Miller

Author:Kenneth R. Miller [Miller, Kenneth R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780060175931
Google: bgBiQgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0061233501
Barnesnoble: 0061233501
Goodreads: 206058
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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FINDING DARWIN’S GOD

interlocking, coordinated presence of at least nine enzymes and three cofactors. And a Darwinian explanation for its origin has now been crafted. Against the backdrop of these and many other studies, the claim that Darwinism has failed to explain “even a single biochemical machine” sounds a little hollow.

PLUGGING A LEAK

By now it should be clear that any claim that evolution cannot produce complex, well-designed biochemical machines is just plain wrong. We could, I think, fairly and reasonably close the books on the issue of irreducible complexity, and move on to topics of genuine scientific interest.

In the interest of giving the insurgent point of view every benefit of the doubt, however, let’s go one more round—but this time we’ll do it on the critic’s home turf.

One of Behe’s favorite examples against evolution, for him a true case of an irreducibly complex biochemical machine, is the process of blood clotting, or coagulation as it is sometimes called. In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe details the intricate series of factors, activators, and chemical reactions used to start and control the process of blood clotting. This collection of proteins, more than a dozen in all, circulate in plasma, the fluid portion of the blood, just waiting for an appropriate stimulus to set them off. As he describes it, the clotting process is a “Rube Goldberg machine” of bewildering complexity that requires each and every step to be performed perfectly to be effective.

And it could not have evolved, according to Behe, because the whole system, each and every part, has to be present in order for the system to work.

This is a remarkable assertion, especially given the fact that Behe describes, almost admiringly, the years of extraordinary work done by molecular biologist Russell Doolittle on the evolution of the clotting mechanism. Despite this work, Behe claims that “no one on earth has the vaguest idea how the coagulation cascade came to be.”’

Needless to say, all this came as a bit of a surprise to Doolittle himself. After reading Behe’s book, he wrote about it in the Boston Review, noting that his early interests in the evolution of blood clotting had led him to devote thirty-five years of research to the general subject of proteins and the evolution. He wrote (with just a twinge of sarcasm),

“Now it appears that I have wasted my career.”

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