The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism by Behe Michael J

Author:Behe, Michael J. [Behe, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2007-06-05T03:00:00+00:00

DARWIN MEETS MICHELSON-MORLEY

P. falciparum, HIV, and E. coli are all very, very different from each other. They range from the simple to the complex, have very different life cycles, and represent three different fundamental domains of life: eukaryote, virus, and prokaryote. Yet they all tell the same tale of Darwinian evolution. Single simple changes to old cellular machinery that can help in dire circumstances are easy to come by. This is where Darwin rules, in the land of antibiotic resistance and single tiny steps. Burning a bridge that can stop an invading army or breaking a lock that can slow a burglar are easy and effective. But if just one or a few steps have to be jumped to gain a beneficial effect, as with chloroquine resistance, random mutation starts breathing hard. Skipping a few more steps appears to be beyond the edge of evolution.

There is much evidence from these studies that, in their incoherent flailing for short-term advantage, Darwinian processes can easily break molecular machinery. There is no evidence that Darwinian processes can take the multiple, coherent steps needed to build new molecular machinery, the kind of machinery that fills the cell.

Yet if it can do so little, why is random mutation / natural selection so highly regarded by biologists? Because the dominant theory requires it. There is ample precedent in the history of science for the overwhelming bulk of the scientific community strongly believing in imaginary entities postulated by a favored theory. For example, in the nineteenth century physicists knew that light behaved as a wave, but a wave in what? Ocean waves travel through water, sound waves through air; what medium do light waves travel through as they traverse space from the sun to the earth? The answer, announced with the utmost confidence by James Clerk Maxwell, the greatest physicist of the age, was the “aether” (that is, “ether”).17

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