Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, focuses on how “Darwinian processes nicely account for changes at the species and genus levels of biological classification, but not for changes at the level of family or higher”—in other words, microevolution but not macroevolution.

Michael Behe, a 67-year-old biochemistry professor who has taught at Lehigh University since 1985, has helped to create nine children and two major theories.

His first book, Darwin’s Black Box, focused on “irreducible complexity,” the idea that major evolutionary change requires dozens of small changes to happen all at the same time, an event so statistically improbable as to be virtually impossible.

Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, focuses on how “Darwinian processes nicely account for changes at the species and genus levels of biological classification, but not for changes at the level of family or higher”—in other words, microevolution but not macroevolution.

Behe’s explanation: “The heyday of Darwin’s theory took place in the absence of answers to very basic biological questions such as, among others: What is the nature of a gene? Exactly how is genetic information physically passed to an offspring? Beginning in the 1940s with the discovery that DNA—not protein or something else—is the genetic material, experimental work progressively uncovered more and more basic facts of molecular biology.”

To learn those facts, Behe explains, scientists need to “examine huge numbers of organisms over many generations. … Only in the past twenty years have such detailed, rigorous evolutionary studies even begun to be conducted. … [Now] we are in a much stronger position to judge Darwin’s theories based on sound experiments, not blinkered postulates.”

Darwin Devolves is our Science Book of the Year because its message to standard issue Neo-Darwinists is, to quote the book of Daniel, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin”: Conventional evolutionary theory is being weighed in the scientific balance and found wanting. It will be overthrown. Here are excerpts from J.C. Derrick’s interview of Michael Behe:

Read More