2008 Woodie Awards
RSSProfessor continues to contest evolution
By Alison Stravitz
Issue date: 11/12/07 Section: News
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His second book, released in June, follows up on his first, "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," and further explains the weaknesses of Darwin's theory of evolution.
"It will try to be more quantitative than the first book and show how deeply into biology [intelligent] design extends, and, conversely, how much randomness in the Darwinian processes can explain about life," Behe said.
Behe said he is not looking to prove the theory of intelligent design, but he is looking at the evidence for it. Intelligent design, however, is hard to investigate, he said.
"What I am trying to do in my new book is ask where a reasonable dividing line is between what is doable by chance in natural selection and what might require something else - and that something else is likely design, in my view, even though I don't prove that," Behe said.
The reviews of his latest book are written by journalists from scientific publications or those from philosophical and religious magazines, Behe said.
"The reviews from the scientists were uniformly scathing," Behe said. "Nonetheless, I was very encouraged by those reviews because the arguments they offered against my book were not very strong, in my opinion."
While the book has taken up most of Behe's time over the past two years, Behe said he still made one or two speeches on intelligent design each month.
"Whenever I go speak on this issue at places, I always get a very large crowd," Behe said.
Since May, Behe has attended a philosopher's conference on intelligent design and evolution at New York University; participated in a talk covered by C-SPAN about his new book; debated with a University of Michigan anthropologist at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; and appeared on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
