I’ve found a new article on intelligent design, and I didn’t find it in my regular online haunts for science news: Evolution News and Mind Matters. This time, it’s an article by Dr. Michael Behe, writing in the American Spectator, of all places. His topic is this: how do Darwinists explain the origin of new body types and new organ types? Do they have the naturalistic mechanisms they need to do the work?

Here’s the article from American Spectator.

Here’s the thing to be explained:

As one prominent evolutionary biologist wrote in a leading science journal just a few years ago, “Modern evolutionary theory … has little to say about the actual history of life, especially the emergence of new levels of biological complexity, and nothing at all about the origin of life.” But those are exactly the most intriguing questions! Why, after more than a century and a half, does Darwin’s theory still fail to account for the mysteries it had promised to explain?

I looked up that quote and it does indeed come from this article in a science journal. The problem is, how do you come up with a complicated design like a bat’s ability to fly, or a whale’s ability to live under water? Do the Darwinists have a mechanism?

He says it doesn’t work for complicated designs, because small aimless steps don’t create a design:

The stumbling block is that the mechanism Darwin proposed to account for differences — “natural selection” sifting random mutations — is quite the feeble tool. It can only work, in Darwin’s words, “by numerous, successive, slight modifications,” that is, one single aimless step at a time. If that first mutation is helpful, then great, it can grope for another step. But when a long line of coordinated changes is required to build an intricate system, selection has no power to look ahead.

This myopic mechanism seemed reasonably promising way back in Darwin’s day, when comparatively little of life’s complexity was known, and when the foundation of life, the cell, was thought to be a simple glob of jelly, dubbed “protoplasm.” Maybe protoplasm could be expanded smoothly here, shrunk there, and molded a little at a time into whatever shape was needed, the way a potter might shape soft clay on a wheel.

Yet modern biology has revealed that cells are preternaturally sophisticated assemblages — literally automated, miniaturized factories. In the case of reproductive cells, they contain the tremendous number of complex machines (yes, actual machines, made of molecules) and instructions needed to build whatever kind of plant or animal they generate. Just try to think up a realistic way to retool a computer-controlled factory that is making cars into one that makes helicopters or submarines — one nut or bolt, one line of computer code, one tiny, random alteration in the factory at a time. That’s the magnitude of the problem facing Darwinian explanations for bats and whales and many other creatures.

This makes me think about what would happen if I had to write code one letter at a time by throwing a bowling ball at the keyboard. You could hope to get the letters in the right order for something to compile and run, but problem not something like bat flight.

His article is actually about what modern materialists / naturalists are doing to try to save the idea of no-designer from all this emerging complexity. He looks at several of their proposed extensions of Darwinian theory, and explains why they don’t work.

This is the one that stood out to me:

Another EES idea is “Natural Genetic Engineering.” Advocates of NGE point out that many of the tools molecular biologists use to manipulate DNA in a lab (to clone it, sequence it, and so on) are harvested from life, because cells are already endowed with a sophisticated box of tools to build and propagate life. If humans can use those cellular tools for their own purposes, the thinking goes, maybe cells can use them to direct their own evolution — to rearrange and improve their own DNA.

But the elegant tools are already there — where did they come from? And exactly how is an apparently unconscious cell supposed to direct itself to evolve when intelligent humans can barely make simple changes to cells without unexpected, damaging side effects? Meanwhile, in lab experiments where cells are allowed to grow and evolve on their own, over many generations they invariably change by degrading genes they already had, not by building complex new ones. When biologists observe life closely rather than invent stories, they see evolution working mainly by de-volution.

The other ones he looked at were even more crazy. Well, if you’re interested in understanding how to critically evaluate scientific theories like Darwinism, then take a look at his article. But, if you are already working in a biology department, it might be a good idea to be careful who you discuss this with. It might negatively impact your career to question this ancient, evidence-resistant theory of origins.