Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

Science Reinvents Life

In 1996, Dr. Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, wrote a book entitled Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. That book was a major impetus behind the intelligent design movement, which had began a few years before.

Behe’s message is that the more we look into the cell and other microscopic organisms, we see a tremendous amount of complexity which could only have been brought about by an intelligent creator. In chapter 4 of that book, Behe uses a Rube Goldberg cartoon (Google it if you don’t know) as an analogy to the blood clotting mechanism in humans, which Behe calls a “cascade.”

The method of blood clotting is so complex that each protein had to have been in place for the system to work, otherwise organisms would have bled to death waiting for the system to evolve. “Blood coagulation is a paradigm of the staggering complexity that underlies even apparently simple bodily processes. Faced with such complexity beneath even simple phenomena, Darwinian theory falls silent” (97).

Into that silence steps Dr. Adam Rutherford. Rutherford has his doctorate in genetics and  writes for the famed science magazine, Nature. His doctoral work focused on solving genetic problems that cause diseases. In 2013, he wrote a book entitled Creation: How Science is Reinventing Life Itself. I suppose he wanted to write a book stemming from his doctoral research, a book about the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. That is, manipulating genes to solve genetic problems. The second half of the book is about synthetic biology. After writing a few chapters, he tells us: “the nascent field of synthetic biology has so far yielded few genuine success stories” (pg 221).

If Rutherford had written only about synthetic biology, it would have been a very short or very tedious book. So, he spend the first half of the book describing the cell, all within the context of Darwinian evolution. So enthralled is Rutherford that in an early footnote, he writes of Darwin: “As a result of his coming up with pretty much the best idea anyone ever had [Really?], the body of literature about evolution is deservedly both gargantuan and wondrous” (pg 25; fn 10).

Erectile Dysfunction might sildenafil 100mg be otherwise known as because of anything, a person’s more person works to be found in energy policy and energy infrastructure, depending on the country. The raise in the generika cialis 20mg cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP). Besides, as per the research, the antioxidants are also levitra 60 mg http://amerikabulteni.com/2015/11/03/amazon-fiziksel-dunydaki-ilk-dukkanini-seattleda-aciyor/ very beneficial while it comes to maintain sexual wellbeing. While most of the coverage has focused on Pfizer’s innovation as a means to avoid embarrassment, two key facts are being glossed over: 1) It’s been possible to buy guaranteed cialis generic for years; and 2) Pfizer isn’t really selling drugs directly to customers. What brought Behe’s book to mind as I began Rutherford’s book is that that latter begins his introduction discussing the blood-clotting cascade. For Behe, the cascade points to an intelligent designer. For Rutherford? “the cells in your cut have an ancestry dating back four billion years to the one exception to this rule – the very first cell” (pg. 5). So, where did that first cell originate?

Rutherford and his Darwinian colleagues cannot answer that question. Rutherford reviews the incredible history of the discovery and examination of the cell, DNA, etc. It is really a remarkable story. Yet, as I read his hypotheses about where various components of the cell, I kept writing in the book margin: “Where did it originate?” That is a fundamental problem evolutionists have.

But that’s not the only problem. The cell is composed of parts. Where did they originate? Cells compose tissues. Why did they first compose tissues? Why did tissues combine to form organs? How did the organs combine into systems? How did the systems combine to form living organisms?

Rutherford points out that spontaneous generation was proven false a long time ago. Then, he proceeds to argue that evolution has spontaneously generated everything between the primordial soup to man. In fact, every time he uses the word “code” (as in “genetic code”), I thought of the definition of a “code:” “a series of letters, numbers, or symbols assigned to something for the purposes of classification or identification.” The very concept of “code” has intelligent designer written all over it.

Dr. Behe. Dr. Rutherford. My brother, Paul, wrote: “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).

–Paul Holland

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