Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Hey everyone. Welcome to ID the Future. Thank you for joining me today.
[00:00:15] Well, on this episode I'm going to read to you from one of the most consequential science books of the last half century. It's Darwin's Black Box, written by biochemist and and professor Michael J. Behe. Now, in 2026, this book turns 30 years old. In a separate two part interview, I caught up with Dr. Behe to discuss the book's impact over the last three decades. So don't miss that in two separate episodes. But today I wanted to read to you a portion of it just in case you haven't read it yet or it's been a long time since you did.
[00:00:50] Now, Dr. John west, vice president of Discovery Institute, recently called Darwin's Black Box one of the most influential books on science in our lifetime. It was an intellectual bombshell when it came out in August of 1996. It was reviewed by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other major outlets. It was published by a major New York publishing house, the Free Press, then a division of Simon and Schuster. It was included in a list of the 100 most influential books of the century and by National Review, and it's gone on to sell over 300,000 copies and counting.
[00:01:28] Well, today I'm going to read to you the preface to the book as well as part of chapter one. And afterward I'll let you know how to get a hold of Dr. Behe's books and where you can catch his popular videos as well.
[00:01:41] Let's jump into the reading now.
[00:01:44] Preface A Molecular Phenomenon it is commonplace, almost banal, to say that science has made great strides in understanding nature.
[00:01:55] The laws of physics are now so well understood that space probes fly unerringly to photograph worlds billions of miles from Earth.
[00:02:04] Computers, telephones, electric lights and untold other examples testify to the mastery of science and technology over the forces of nature.
[00:02:13] Vaccines and high yield crops have stayed the ancient enemies of mankind. Disease and hunger, at least in parts of the world. Almost weekly announcements of discoveries in molecular biology encourage the hopes of cures for genetic diseases and more.
[00:02:29] Yet understanding how something works is not the same as understanding how it came to be.
[00:02:35] For example, the motions of the planets in the solar system can be predicted with tremendous accuracy.
[00:02:42] However, the origin of the solar system the the question of how the sun, planets and their moons formed in the first place is still controversial.
[00:02:50] Science may eventually solve the riddle. Still, the point remains that understanding the origin of something is different from understanding its day to day workings. Science's mastery of nature has led many people to presume that it can indeed must also explain the origin of nature and life.
[00:03:08] Darwin's proposal that life can be explained by natural selection acting on variation has been overwhelmingly accepted and in educated circles for more than a century. Even though the basic mechanisms of life remained utterly mysterious until several decades ago.
[00:03:25] Modern science has learned that ultimately, life is a molecular phenomenon. All organisms are made of molecules that act as the nuts and bolts, gears and pulleys of biological systems.
[00:03:38] Certainly there are complex biological features, such as the circulation of blood, that emerge at higher levels. But the gritty details of life are the province of biomolecules.
[00:03:49] Therefore, the science of biochemistry, which studies these molecules, has as its mission the exploration of the very foundation of life.
[00:03:59] Since the mid-1950s, biochemistry has painstakingly elucidated the workings of life at the molecular level.
[00:04:07] Darwin was ignorant of the reason for variation within a species, one of the requirements of his theory. But biochemistry has identified the molecular basis for it.
[00:04:18] 19th century science could not even guess at the mechanism of vision, immunity or movement. But modern biochemistry has identified the molecules that allow these and other functions.
[00:04:31] It was once expected that the basis of life would be exceedingly simple. That expectation has been smashed.
[00:04:38] Vision, motion and other biological functions have proven to be no less sophisticated than television cameras and automobiles.
[00:04:47] Science has made enormous progress in understanding how the chemistry of life works. But the elegance and complexity of biological systems at the molecular level have paralyzed science's attempts to explain their origins.
[00:05:02] There has been virtually no attempt to account for the origin of specific cosmic complex biomolecular systems, much less any progress.
[00:05:11] Many scientists have gamely asserted that explanations are already in hand or will be sooner or later. But no support for such assertions can be found in the professional science literature.
[00:05:23] More importantly, there are compelling reasons, based on the structure of the systems themselves, to think that a Darwinian explanation for the mechanisms of life will forever prove elusive.
[00:05:35] Evolution is a flexible word. It can be used by one person to mean something as simple as change over time, or by another person to mean the descent of all life forms from a common ancestor, leaving the mechanism of change unspecified.
[00:05:50] In its full throated biological sense, however, evolution means a process whereby life arose from non living matter to and subsequently developed entirely by natural means.
[00:06:02] And that is the sense in which I use the word evolution throughout this book Apologia for details.
[00:06:10] Several years ago, Santa Claus gave my oldest son a plastic tricycle for Christmas. Unfortunately, busy man that he is, Santa had no time to take it out of the box and assemble it before heading off the the task fell to Dad. I took the parts out of the box, unfolded the assembly instructions, and sighed.
[00:06:30] There were six pages of detailed instructions. Line up the eight different types of screws, insert two one and a half inch screws through the handle into the shaft, stick the shaft through the square hole in the body of the bike, and so on.
[00:06:45] I didn't want to even read the instructions because I knew they couldn't be skimmed like a newspaper. The whole purpose is in the details.
[00:06:52] But I rolled up my sleeves, opened a can of beer, and set to work.
[00:06:56] After several hours, the tricycle was assembled. In the process. I had indeed read every single instruction in the booklet several times to drill them into my head and perform the exact actions that the instructions required.
[00:07:12] My aversion to instructions seems to be widespread.
[00:07:15] Although most households own a video cassette recorder, most folks cannot program them. These technological wonders come with complete operating instructions, but the very thought of tediously studying each sentence of the booklet makes many people delegate the job to the nearest 10 year old.
[00:07:35] Unfortunately, much of biochemistry is like an instruction booklet in the sense that the importance of is in the details.
[00:07:42] A student of biochemistry who merely skims through a biochemistry textbook is virtually certain to spend much of the next exam staring at the ceiling as drops of sweat trickle down his or her forehead.
[00:07:55] Skimming the textbook does not prepare a student for questions such as outline in detail the mechanism of hydrolysis of a peptide bond by Trypsin, paying special attention to the role of transition state binding energy.
[00:08:09] Although there are broad principles of biochemistry that help a mortal comprehend the general picture of the chemistry of life, broad principles only take you so far.
[00:08:19] A degree in engineering does not substitute for the tricycle instruction booklet, nor does it directly help you to program your vcr.
[00:08:28] Many people, unfortunately, are all too aware of the pickiness of biochemistry.
[00:08:33] People who suffer with sickle cell anemia, enduring much pain in their shortened lives know the importance of the little detail that changed. 1 out of 146amino acid residues in 1 out of the tens of thousands of proteins in their body.
[00:08:49] The parents of children who die of Tay Sachs or cystic fibrosis or who suffer from diabetes or hemophilia know more than they want to about the importance of biochemical details.
[00:09:01] So, as a writer who wants people to read my work, I face a dilemma. People hate to read details. Yet the story of the impact of biochemistry on evolutionary theory rests solely in the details.
[00:09:13] Therefore, I have to write the kind of book people don't like to read in order to persuade them of the ideas that push me to write.
[00:09:20] Nonetheless, complexity must be experienced to be appreciated.
[00:09:24] So, gentle reader, I beg your patience. There are going to be lots of details in this book.
[00:09:30] The book is divided into three parts. Part one gives some background and shows why evolution must now be argued at the molecular level, the domain of the science of biochemistry. This portion is largely free from technical details, although some do creep in during a discussion of the eye.
[00:09:48] Part two contains the example chapters where most of the complexity is found. Part three is a non technical discussion of the implications of biochemistry's discoveries.
[00:10:00] So the hard stuff is confined mostly to part two.
[00:10:03] In that section, however, I liberally use analogies to familiar everyday objects to get the ideas across. And even in that section, detailed descriptions of biochemical systems are minimized.
[00:10:15] Paragraphs that contain the heaviest doses of details, replete with eye glazing. Technical terms are set off from the regular text with the ornament that looks like a square to brace the reader.
[00:10:26] Some readers may plow right through part two.
[00:10:29] Others, however, may wish to skim the section or even skip parts, then return when they're ready to absorb more. For those who want a deeper understanding of biochemistry, I have included an appendix outlining some general biochemical principles. I encourage those who want all the details to borrow an introductory biochemistry text from the library.
[00:10:52] The box is opened Chapter one Lilliputian Biology the Limits of an Idea this book is about an idea, Darwinian evolution, that is being pushed to its limits by discoveries in biochemistry.
[00:11:09] Biochemistry is the study of the very basis of life, the molecules that make up cells and tissues that catalyze the chemical reactions of digestion, photosynthesis, immunity, and more. The astonishing progress made by biochemistry since the mid-1950s is a monumental tribute to science's power to understand the world.
[00:11:32] It has brought many practical benefits in medicine and agriculture. We may have to pay a price, though, for our knowledge. When foundations are unearthed, the structures that rest on them are shaken.
[00:11:44] Sometimes they collapse.
[00:11:46] When sciences such as physics finally uncovered their foundations, old ways of understanding the world had to be tossed out, extensively revised or restricted to a limited part of nature.
[00:11:59] Will this happen to the theories of evolution by natural selection?
[00:12:04] Like many great ideas, Darwin's is elegantly simple. He observed that there is variation in all species. Some members are bigger, some smaller, some faster, some lighter in color, and so forth.
[00:12:16] He reasoned that since limited food supplies could not supply all organisms that are born, the ones whose chance variation gave them an advantage in the Struggle for life would tend to survive and reproduce, outcompeting the less favored ones.
[00:12:31] If the variation were inherited, then the characteristics of the species would change over time. Over great periods, great changes might occur.
[00:12:41] For more than a century, most scientists have thought that virtually all of life, or at least all of its most interesting features, resulted from natural selection. Working on random variation, Darwin's idea had been used to explain finch beaks and horse hooves, moth coloration and insect slaves, and the distribution of life around the globe and through the ages.
[00:13:04] The theory has even been stretched by some scientists to interpret human behavior. Why desperate people commit suicide, why teenagers have babies out of wedlock, why some groups do better on intelligence tests than other groups, and why religious missionaries forego marriage and children. There is nothing, no organ or idea, no sense or thought that has not been the subject of evolutionary rumination.
[00:13:29] Almost a century and a half after Darwin proposed his theory, evolutionary biology has had much success in accounting for patterns of life we see around us.
[00:13:38] To many, its triumph seems complete. But the real work of life does not happen at the level of the whole animal or organ.
[00:13:46] The most important parts of living things are too small to be seen.
[00:13:51] Life is lived in the details, and it is molecules that handle life's details. Darwin's idea might explain horse hooves, but can it explain life's foundation? Shortly after 1950, science advanced to the point where it could determine the shapes and properties of of a few of the molecules that make up living organisms.
[00:14:10] Slowly, painstakingly, the structures of more and more biological molecules were elucidated and the way they work inferred from countless experiments. The cumulative results show with piercing clarity that life is based on machines.
[00:14:24] Machines made of molecules.
[00:14:27] Molecular machines haul cargo from one place in the cell to another along highways made of other molecules, while still others act as cables, ropes and pulleys to hold the cell in shape.
[00:14:38] Machines turn cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell or causing it to grow.
[00:14:45] Solar powered machines capture the energy of photons and store it in chemicals.
[00:14:50] Electrical machines allow current to flow through nerves.
[00:14:53] Manufacturing machines rebuild and build other molecular machines as well as themselves.
[00:14:59] Cells swim using machines, copy themselves with machinery, ingest food with machinery.
[00:15:05] In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines control every cellular process.
[00:15:11] Thus, the details of life are finely calibrated and the machinery of life enormously complex.
[00:15:19] Can all of life be fit into Darwin's theory of evolution?
[00:15:23] Because the popular media likes to publish exciting stories, and because some scientists enjoy speculating about how far their discoveries might go, it has been difficult for the public to separate fact from conjecture.
[00:15:36] To find the real evidence, you have to dig into the journals and books published by the scientific community itself.
[00:15:42] The scientific literature reports experiments firsthand, and the reports are generally free of the flights of fancy that make their way into the spin offs that follow.
[00:15:52] But as I will note later, if you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines, the basis of life, developed, you find an eerie and complete silence.
[00:16:06] The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it. Molecular machines raise an as yet impenetrable barrier to Darwinism's universal reach.
[00:16:17] To find out why, in this book I will examine several fascinating molecular machines, then ask whether they can ever be explained by random mutation and natural selection.
[00:16:29] Evolution is a controversial topic, so it's necessary to address a few basic questions at the beginning of the book.
[00:16:36] Many people think that questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent to espousing creationism. As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an earth formed only about 10,000 years ago, an interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular.
[00:16:51] For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is.
[00:16:59] Further, I find the idea of common descent, that all organisms share a common ancestor, fairly convincing and have no particular reason to doubt it.
[00:17:08] I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework. And I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world. Although Darwin's mechanism, natural selection, working on variation might explain many things, however, I do not believe it explains molecular life.
[00:17:30] I also do not think it's surprising that the new signs of the very small might change the way we view the less small.
[00:17:40] So at this point, Dr. Behe dives into a very brief history of biology and an introduction to the chemistry of life.
[00:17:47] And then here's how he closes chapter one of his book.
[00:17:52] It's a section called Calvinism.
[00:17:56] It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple.
[00:18:05] A happy example is seen in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.
[00:18:09] Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and traveling back in time, or transmogrifying himself into animal shapes, or using it as a duplicator and making clones of himself.
[00:18:22] A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work.
[00:18:31] In Some ways, grown up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin, for example. Centuries ago, it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly from spoiled food.
[00:18:43] This was easy to believe because small animals were thought to be very simple. Before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs.
[00:18:54] But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science could not detect what was really happening.
[00:19:06] In the 19th century, that meant the cell.
[00:19:10] When beer, milk or urine was allowed to sit for several days in containers and even closed ones, they always became cloudy from something growing in them.
[00:19:19] The microscopes of the 18th and 19th centuries showed that the growth was very small, apparently living cells.
[00:19:26] So it seemed reasonable that simple living organisms could arise spontaneously from liquids.
[00:19:32] The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as simple.
[00:19:37] One of the chief advocates of the theory of spontaneous generation is during the middle of the 19th century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory.
[00:19:49] From the limited view of cells that microscopes provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon, not much different from a piece of microscopic Jello.
[00:20:01] So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life with no internal organs could be produced easily and from inanimate material.
[00:20:08] Now, of course, we know better.
[00:20:11] Here is a simple analogy. Darwin is to our understanding of the origin of vision, as Haeckel is to our understanding of the origin of life.
[00:20:20] In both cases, brilliant 19th century scientists tried to explain Lilliputian biology that was hidden from them. And both did so by assuming that the inside of the black box must be simple.
[00:20:33] Time has proven them wrong.
[00:20:35] In the first half of the 20th century, the many branches of biology did not often communicate with each other.
[00:20:41] As a result, genetics, systematics, paleontology, comparative anatomy, embryology and other areas developed their own views of what evolution meant.
[00:20:51] Inevitably, evolutionary theory began to mean different things to different disciplines.
[00:20:57] A coherent view of Darwinian evolution was being lost.
[00:21:01] In the middle of the century, however, leaders of the fields organized a series of interdisciplinary meetings to combine their views into a coherent theory of evolution based on Darwinian principles.
[00:21:13] The result has been called the evolutionary synthesis and the theory called Neo Darwinism.
[00:21:19] Neo Darwinism is the basis of modern evolutionary thought.
[00:21:24] One branch of science was not invited to the meetings, and for good reason. It did not yet exist.
[00:21:30] The beginnings of modern biochemistry came only after neo Darwinism had been officially launched.
[00:21:37] Thus, just as biology had to be reinterpreted after the complexity of microscopic life was discovered, Neo Darwinism must be reconsidered in light of advances in biochemistry.
[00:21:50] The scientific disciplines that were part of the evolutionary synthesis are all non molecular.
[00:21:56] Yet for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life.
[00:22:02] It is the purpose of this book to show that it does not well, if you haven't read Darwin's Black Box, now's the time. It's written to be accessible to the lay reader. Sure, it has doses of technicality in the example chapters in the middle of the book, but the opening section and the closing section are written in everyday prose that can easily be grasped.
[00:22:26] You can get a copy of Darwin's black box at Dr. Behe's website, and that is michael behe.org michaelbehe.org and if you want some videos to help you visually grasp the concepts that Dr. Behe discusses, we've got you covered there as well. The video series Secrets of the Cell is available on his website as well as on YouTube. You can share them with your kids, associates, colleagues, anyone who might be interested in starting a conversation about these important topics. And speaking of videos, if you want to understand why the work of Dr. Behe is so important, check out the documentary film Revolutionary, which tells his story. You can view that on YouTube, or you can go to revolutionarybehe.com revolutionary behe.com and his website michael behe.org to find all these resources.
[00:23:21] Well, for Idea of the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you again soon.
