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When Michael J. Behe's first book, Darwin's Black Box, was
published in 1996, it launched the intelligent design movement.
Critics howled, yet hundreds of thousands of readers -- and a
growing number of scientists -- were intrigued by Behe's claim that
Darwinism could not explain the complex machinery of the cell. Now,
in his long-awaited follow-up, Behe presents far more than a
challenge to Darwinism: He presents the evidence of the genetics
revolution -- the first direct evidence of nature's mutational
pathways -- to radically redefine the debate about Darwinism. How
much of life does Darwin's theory explain? Most scientists believe
it accounts for everything from the machinery of the cell to the
history of life on earth. Darwin's ideas have been applied to law,
culture, and politics. But Darwin's theory has been proven only in
one sense: There is little question that all species on earth
descended from a common ancestor. Overwhelming anatomical, genetic,
and fossil evidence exists for that claim. But the crucial question
remains: How did it happen? Darwin's proposed mechanism -- random
mutation and natural selection -- has been accepted largely as a
matter of faith and deduction or, at best, circumstantial evidence.
Only now, thanks to genetics, does science allow us to seek direct
evidence. The genomes of many organisms have been sequenced, and
the machinery of the cell has been analyzed in great detail. The
evolutionary responses of microorganisms to antibiotics and humans
to parasitic infections have been traced over tens of thousands of
generations. As a result, for the first time in history Darwin's
theory can be rigorously evaluated. The results are shocking.
Although it can explain marginal changes in evolutionary history,
random mutation and natural selection explain very little of the
basic machinery of life. The edge of evolution, a line that defines
the border between random and nonrandom mutation, lies very far
from where Darwin pointed. Behe argues convincingly that most of
the mutations that have defined the history of life on earth have
been nonrandom. Although it will be controversial and stunning,
this finding actually fits a general pattern discovered by other
branches of science in recent decades: The universe as a whole was
fine-tuned for life. From physics to cosmology to chemistry to
biology, life on earth stands revealed as depending upon an endless
series of unlikely events. The clear conclusion: The universe was
designed for life.
Ten years ago, Darwin's Black Box launched the Intelligent Design
movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design,
beyond Darwinian randomness. Today the movement is stronger than
ever, and the book is a classic and an international bestseller. At
last, Michael Behe has updated the book with a major new afterword
on the state of the debate. The Intelligent Design movement was
born when a handful of scientists realized that nature exhibits
characteristics that could not have evolved by random mutation.
Prominent among them was Michael Behe, a microbiologist working in
a field that Darwin could not even have imagined existing.
Microbiology has discovered staggering complexity at the cellular
level of life and during his research Behe made a stunning
discovery: Some parts of life are irreducibly complex. They cannot
function without all of their parts. Yet step-by-step genetic
mutations would never produce all of those parts together at once.
Some parts of the biological world must have been designed. From
one end of the spectrum to the other, DARWIN'S BLACK BOX has
established itself as the key text in the intelligent design
movement, the one argument that must be addressed in order to
determine whether Darwinian evolution is sufficient to explain life
as we know it, or not.
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