by Michael J. Behe
1994

This is the author's comment to a response to his original paper.


FAJITAS? GINGER BEER? Bubble and Squeak? Is this the reply that Darwin's
vaunted theory gives to a serious, quantitative, detailed, experimental
challenge? Dr. Leslie Johnson asserts that "the theory is healthy," but
the replies it gives to probing questions are those of a ninety-eight
pound weakling.

I am very pleased that Dr. Johnson agrees with me that the example of the
monkey producing a functional sentence by replacing a letter at a time in
a nonsense character string is illegitimate. She appears not to realize,
however, that it is Darwinians who have advanced this example. Perhaps she
can inform her co-panelist Michael Ruse, who uses a similar analogy in his
book Darwinism Defended, of his error. And perhaps he can then contact
Richard Dawkins, who uses the analogy in The Blind Watchmaker, to tell him
of their mutual mistake.

The book that launched Darwin's theory was entitled The Origin of Species.
Darwinism's appeal rests largely on its claim to be able to explain the
origin of the great complexity of the biological world, a complexity that
all admit gives the appearance of design, without recourse to non-natural
agents. But when detailed questions are asked about the origin of
biological structures, proponents of the theory all too frequently resort
to hand-waving and metaphor of the kind Dr. Johnson offers. For example,
we are told by her that "we seek to understand evolutionary attainment. .
. ," "evolution in bacteria tends to involve minor changes . . . ," and
"[mammals'] evolution frequently involves regulatory genes." Regrettably,
however, Dr. Johnson never gets around to telling us, even for a single
example, exactly which evolutionary changes gave rise to which biological
structures in the real world. We are thus left wondering how she knows
that organisms have evolved at all.

Dr. Johnson is not atone in her style of argumentation: no one at this
conference has argued the merits of Darwinism by pointing to a complex
biological structure and explaining in detail how it arose from a simpler
structure through the agency of natural selection. Instead we are
implicitly invited to imagine such developments by means of fuzzy mental
images, playing horror movie-like transmogrifications in our minds. This
is the appeal of much of the "computer evolution" work that Dr. Johnson
cites favorably: images can "evolve" like Dr. Jekyll on the computer
screen without having to be tested for their ability to function in the
real world.

But, then, if no one actually uses Darwin's theory to give plausible,
detailed explanations for the origin of complex biological structures,
what exactly is it good for? To use as a "framework," Dr. Johnson tells
us. "Without evolution" descriptions of nature "would be as exciting as .
. . telephone books." That may be true for Dr. Johnson, but it is not true
for children visiting a zoo, it is not true for most laypersons, and it
wasn't true for pre-Darwinian biologists like Linnaeus and Cuvier. It is a
dangerous intellectual game to confuse one's own mental filing cabinets
for the real world.

Foundation for Thought and Ethics.

Copies of the book Darwinism: Science or Philosophy are available from:
Foundation for Thought and Ethics