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Professor Michael J. Behe (born 1952) is an American biochemist and intelligent design advocate. Behe is noted for introducing what he calls "irreducible complexity", a controversial idea that life is too complex at the biochemical level to have evolved.
Behe is professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
Some opponents of Behe's theory of irreducible complexity dismiss it as unworthy of consideration, on the grounds that it is "pseudoscientific" to attribute the appearence of any species of life to a cause other than physical law. These opponents often claim that the scientific community at large (not just biologists) have rejected Behe's idea as pseudoscience.
Some supporters of Behe's theory argue that there is no justification for assuming that the appearence of every species of life must be caused by physical law alone. For example, erosion could not have created the Rosetta stone; archeologists were right in guessing that it may have been designed and created by humans.
Biography
Behe graduated from Drexel University in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. He did his graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell anemia. From 1978 to 1982 he did postdoctoral work on DNA structure at the National Institutes of Health. From 1982 to 1985 he was assistant professor of chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he met his wife. In 1985 he moved to Lehigh University.
Behe, a Roman Catholic, accepted the scientific theory of evolution and was thus evolutionary creationist (theistic evolutionist). However, Behe came to believe that there was scientific evidence that at a biochemical level, there were systems that were "irreducibly complex", meaning that he thought they could not have evolved, and thus must have been created by an "intelligent designer".
Lawyer Phillip E. Johnson had coined the phrase intelligent design in 1991 to describe what he saw a scientific evidence that life had been designed, though critics consider it baseless pseudoscience and an attempt to bring theology into science. In 1996 Behe became a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (later renamed the Center for Science and Culture) the then newly-formed institution to promote intelligent design.
Behe published his ideas on irreducibe complexity in a 1996 book called Darwin's Black Box. Critics claim that Behe's argumentation is based on personal incredulity, not an actual impossibility of explanation for his examples. At least one of these enzymatic chains has been subsequently shown to be reducible, and existing in simpler form in some organisms, and possible evolutionary explanations had been provided.
Behe has written editorial features in the Boston Review, American Spectator, and New York Times.
Bibliography
External links
Pro-intelligent design
Anti-creationist
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