Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: And at that meeting, I thought to myself, hey, I've. I've got a story that maybe I could write a book too about it, because I also discussed my ideas about irreducible complexity there, and I was surprised to find nobody else had thought of that. So I thought I had something to say that nobody else did.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: One of the seminal books of the modern intelligent design movement is Darwin's Black Box, written by biochemist and professor Michael J. Behe. And in 2026, that book turns 30 years old. Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, I'm delighted to be celebrating that milestone with the author of Darwin's black box. Dr. Behe is professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He has authored over 40 technical papers and three books, Darwin's Black Box, the Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves, which argue that living systems at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of deliberate intelligent design.
Mike, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Hey, it's great to be with you, Andrew. Always love to talk with you.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Well, you and I got to see each other recently at the center for Science and Culture's Insiders Briefing. That's our annual meeting to brief donors on our progress this past year, the scientific work that's happening through Discovery Institute, the education and outreach initiatives, and of course, the inroads we're making in media to reach people. The event was extra special this year because we were celebrating the 30th anniversary of the center for Science and Culture. And on that first night, you had a conversation with Dr. John west about the success and staying power of your books.
Let's just start there. Did you enjoy that interaction? And of course, the whole.
The whole event, and were you surprised by the amount of work that the CSC is engaged in?
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Oh, yes, it was a wonderful event. I really enjoyed my conversation with Dr. West. And at the beginning, John west and Steve Meyer interviewed the geezers of the group, the folks who were there from the beginning of the center for Science and Culture, including myself and William Dembski and Paul Nelson and Douglas Sachs and Jay Richards. And so we had time to reminisce a bit and then later compare where we were in the beginning to where we are now. And there were a couple books published back then and within a few years, including Darwin's Black Box, Bill Dempsey's Design Inference, and so on.
But now there are over a hundred Books published on ID and related subjects, many by other publishers, some by the Discovery Institute.
I found out, even I was surprised to see how much Discovery is doing. They've got, you know, 50 different social media venues and they've got many educational outreach initiatives and they're bringing in the next generation of scientists and scholars for, for informing about what Intelligent design is and what its impact is. And so it was a, it was a grand time and it was really nice to meet all of the people involved. The donors that are supporting the, the work of Discovery, of course, can't do it without them and they're just really amazing people. Many amazing stories I heard.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And one, one interesting thing I found was, you know, we had such a rich conversation that first evening about the past and about how, how the founding scientists of the modern movement, you know, sort of got together and pulled their resources and their skills and thoughts together to build this movement. You know, we had, we had some donors at the end of the night wondering, well, gee, you know, what about the future? You know, after, after these, these folks can't do any more work. You know, that was sort of a remains, you know, and then, and then of course the next day. Well, that, that question was answered, wasn't it?
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it sure was. The, the next day a number of younger scientists and, and scholars were gay presentations on the work that they are doing and it was just amazing to hear them.
And Discovery Institute is funding a lot of the work that's being done and so it's really heartening to see that, you know, as white hairs accumulate on my head, that a bunch of folks are already in line and already taking over the lead in the intellectual development of intelligent design.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. And for those who might be listening and watching and still kind of in this idea post Dover that ID has fizzled out or that, you know, there's the best days are behind us. You know, I think both of us can, can assert very strongly that the Discovery Institute is funding all kinds of great new projects and really the future looks bright and we saw that.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Let me just comment on that. That, you know, the Dover trial was hiccup, but of course, I don't know what, I'm no lawyer, but the point is that the law doesn't regulate nature and, and how nature got here or what's the best explanation for nature. It reminds me of the debates over daylight saving time and not non daylight saving time and whether we should pass law telling the sun it has to rise earlier in the morning or.
Well, you can't do that. So some things are beyond politics and, and judicial rulings and so on, and this is certainly one of them.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Yeah. As Steve Meyer is fond of saying, you know, we don't look to federal judges to settle deep and imponderable questions about life and the universe. You know, there's a separate discipline for that.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: So during that conversation that you had with Dr. West at the. At the insiders briefing, Dr. West called Darwin's Black Box one of the most influential books on science in our lifetime. And that's whether you're into ID or not, you know, just. Just one of the most influential books on science in our lifetime. And for those joining us today who may not be, you know, as familiar with the book or with its impact, I just wanted to try to bring that out a little bit today. Darwin's Black Box was an intellectual bombshell. When it came out In August of 1996, it was reviewed by top outlets including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. 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 by National Review, and it's gone on to sell over 300,000 copies and counting. So to the best of your ability, take us back to the beginning, if you would, just for a minute. At what point did you realize you had something special that needed to become a book? And how did you attract such a large publisher?
[00:07:54] Speaker A: Well, gee, the origin story is I actually. I used to believe in Darwinian evolution was true, mostly because that's what I was taught in school. I didn't have any answers to the questions I later raised, but I read Michael Denton's Evolution A Theory in Crisis, and that's what actually turned me against Darwinian evolution and in the direction of intelligent design.
And fortuitously, over the next couple years, I met Philip Johnson.
I'm sure listeners will be familiar with Phil's stuff. He was a UC Berkeley law professor who became interested in evolution as well. And he invited me to a meeting at a place called Pajaro Dunes in California. And it turns out that a number of people who later on became pillars of the ID movement, Steve Meyer, Bill Demski, Paul Nelson were there, too.
And scientists don't write books.
But a number of the folks at this meeting were philosophers and historians, and they read and write books. And at that meeting, I thought to myself, hey, I've got a story that maybe I could write a book too about it. Because I also discussed my ideas about irreducible complexity there. And I was surprised to find nobody else had thought of that. So I thought I had something to say that nobody else did.
And also from that meeting, I remember asking Philip Johnson, how do you go about getting a book published?
And he said, the key is to get a literary agent. They, they are the gatekeepers.
And another person named Tom Bethel, who was a journalist and died a few years ago, he gave me the name of his literary agent, an outfield called writers representatives. And I sent them a couple chapters that I had written for Darwin's Black Box. And they gave me a call within a few days and said they were happy to take it.
So that was, that was, that was the key.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: And give us a sense of where you were as a scientist back in 1996. What were your goals and what were you most concerned with at that time?
[00:10:25] Speaker A: Well, normal academic scientists, you know, want to either a win the Nobel Prize or two, at least get elected to the National Academy of Sciences. So those were my, you know, overarching goals. But I was, my discipline was nucleic acid structure, DNA structure. And I worked on something called Z DNA back in, when I was a postdoc and in my early years as a, as a professor. And that's a different structure from the normal double helical Watson crick form of DNA and studying how that interacted with different proteins, especially things called histones, which are, are part of the, of chromatin. So I was busily doing that when I was kind of knocked for a loop when I started getting involved in intelligent design.
And since then my interests have shifted from normal, what you might call normal science to, to heretical science.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And did you have your appointment at Lehigh by that time?
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. I was hired at Lehigh in 1985 and I got tenure there well before I got involved with ID, something like 88 or 89.
So my book came out in 1996 and I was promoted to full professor the next year. I should say that it's, you know, was in spite of my book, not because of it. You know, folks at Lehigh are, are no more fans of intelligent design than most folks in academia are. But, but I've, I've done very well.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Now did you spend time preparing for possible backlash and criticism as you were putting the book together? Did you know in advance what the critiques might target?
[00:12:21] Speaker A: I did not spend a whole lot of time worrying about that. I it, I didn't think there would be the firestorm that came later. Didn't occur right away.
But what I was most concerned about was after the book came out and I said, nobody has explained any of these complex systems that they're better explained by intelligent design. That somebody would pull me inside and say, oh, didn't you read this paper over here or that one over there? And if I had missed important things in the literature, that. That was my nightmare. But it turns out, turns out I didn't. And 30 years on, nobody, still nobody has been able to provide a.
A serious Darwinian explanation for any of the systems that I discussed way back in 1996 in Darwin's black box.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Wow.
Well, in the preface to Darwin's Black box, you write that understanding how something works is not the same as understanding how it came to be. And that's where we get the black box analogy. Why did you choose that kind of concept? And can you tell us why it works so well?
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Well, yeah, with. The idea of black box is familiar in science. It's used for some system or some machine that does wonderful things, but you don't know how it works. You can't see inside of the black box to see what it's doing.
And the analogy was supposed to say, back in Darwin's day, the cell was a black box. But now we've opened it up and see how it works. But yeah, you know, how something works is not the same thing as, as how it got together, how it came to be. And a good example of that that I actually used in Darwin's black box was the solar system. I said, NASA astronomers can calculate the motions of the planets so well that they can send spaceships out to tour the different planets.
Yet, you know, the. How the solar system got together or came to be is still a matter of debate.
So you can understand how lawnmower works or how a refrigerator works or a computer works, but explaining how it came to be, especially the thinking involved in it, is. Is quite different story.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And it seems that the origin of something, you know, is quite different from how it works. You know, you can study how it works, but you, you. You almost sort of have to bring in other disciplines to ponder where it came from, you know, or what led to it. History, philosophy, you know, other other disciplines to try to help you figure that out. Because sometimes the tools of studying how it works are not adequate.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's what I try to get, at least. Even, Even when you don't consider intelligently designed stuff like, as I said, the, the solar system. Well, I, I guess I shouldn't beg the question, but the point is, yeah, you can see how everything moves, but how did it come to be arranged in that way? Especially if you're trying to model it with just the bare laws of nature, gravity, electromagnetism and so on.
And yeah, so that's a lot of people, including say, folks like Richard Dawkins, a lot of people who push evolutionary biology mix up those two. They say, why look at how the eye works, you know, you know, and everybody believes that it evolved. So you know, what's the problem?
And so you have to alert the public to that, to that point. That in fact how it was put together is a completely separate question from how it does in fact work.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: That also relates to the, the comment you sometimes hear. Well, there's such a mountain of evidence, you know, upholding Darwinian theory. Well, actually if you, if you dig into that mountain, you find the lip service to Darwin's theory and you also find the assumption you're, you're mentioning, you know, that the origins is part of the, you know, the way things work. And so it's not exactly evidence that mountain, you know, if you dig deeper.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Exactly. And my favorite thing to point out to people is that if you read a articles on evolution or even textbooks on evolution, a very common thing to come across is to say, why look at this swell, elegant, functional system. Isn't it wonderful how evolution has produced it for us without any effort even to say how that could happen. And if you go and look in the literature, then say, well, maybe they don't have time to explain it here. If you go look in the literature and try to find explanations, they aren't there.
And this is done routinely.
I've pointed out several examples in my books of even textbooks saying why proteins are functional, functional polypeptides that have been selected by evolution for, you know, many different roles. And what's the evidence supporting that? And it turns out to, it's, it's all based on everybody assuming the same thing.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Yeah, well, one of the things I appreciated in Darwin's black box is you give us a little bit of the early history of biology and how that probed the black box of living things first just with the naked eye and with our reason, you know, many, many centuries ago. And then once new technologies came around like the microscope, biologists were able to get past that initial black box organisms at the macro level and catch their first glimpses of the black box within the biochemistry that powers life at the molecular level. And that biochemical black box has been more Fully open now and studied during the last 75 years. Why is it presenting such a big problem for Darwinian evolution?
[00:18:42] Speaker A: Well, because the molecular level is where life works. Darwin and folks before the 20th century didn't have a clue about how life works because the active components of life turn out to be too small to see. And a quick trip through the history of science and biology. It wasn't until you know, the 1600s that people realized there were microorganisms that existed. Little, little creatures that were too small to see and that they caused diseases before, you know, microscopes. People thought that malaria for example, was caused by bad or polluted air. That's the, that's the etymology of malaria. Mal means bad and aria is air, bad air.
Instead we know it's a microbe that, that infects, can infect a body.
And so Darwin, nobody had a chance of explaining how life occurred because all of the things that Darwin talked about are undergirded by many, many machines that are put together at the molecular level. An analogy I like to use is your computer.
You look at it and you're looking at mine. Right in front of me here you can see the keys on the keyboard and you see a screen here and you see this metal part here. I say well that's not too hard. Get two pieces of, maybe two pieces of metal here and put some stones here for the keys.
But then after research you find out there's electronics inside and, and try to figure out how they work. And the more, the deeper you go into it, down to the nitty gritty, you find it's more and more and more complex than you thought. And that's the same, same thing with biology.
Darwin with his just so stories about how eyes might, little light sensitive spots might grow up to be big eyes or how a bear might turn into a whale or something. They, they didn't have a chance of actually explaining things because it, biology rests on mechanisms that are much more sophisticated and, and impossible to see without further technology.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And it also lays bare the difference, the fundamental difference between a top down approach to biology and a bottom up approach.
And how you might explain each of these black boxes you come across. You know, us in the ID movement, we, we, we sense that there's a, there's a better way to explain biology and that's top down. But when you're trying to explain it, you know, from processes that are bottom up, you, you really end up making a lot of assumptions.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Sure. Nobody tries to explain a computer by talking about how electrons move and then, you know, modifying that. You have to start with an idea of what you're going to do and, and, and gather in components and arrange them in the ways that that will work.
It was unknown to Darwin that biology would be like that too. It's now known to, to modern biologists how sophisticated and integrated all of the systems of biology are. But I think intellectual inertia keeps many people trying to invoke the same explanation that their, their mentors and their old advisors and teachers used back in the day. But a brand new approach I think is called for.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah, well, one of the reasons Darwin's black box is so foundational to the ID movement is that it introduces to a mainstream audience the world of molecular machines.
You write in the book, the cumulative results show with piercing clarity that life is based on machines, machines made of molecules. And then you go on to describe the molecular machines that haul cargo in the cell, that act as cables, ropes and pulleys, some that turn switches on and off. Solar powered machines for capturing energy, electrical machines for the flow of current, manufacturing machines, machines for ingesting food.
Movement. I mean just the list goes on. And obviously some scientists back in the 90s were grasping the reality of molecular machines as they were peering into this black box. But had the public had a chance to grasp it yet?
[00:23:21] Speaker A: I don't think so. Now the, the idea of machinery, real machinery in the cell, only started to spread in the 70s and 80s in the scientific community itself. And so textbooks and so on will would just, would just feature organ level and maybe a few molecules of, of life. So most people in my experience would think of life as some squishy stuff.
Not a whole lot different than what Darwin and his contemporaries thought about it. There's a famous quote that from a guy named Ernst Techlike who described the cell as a simple little glob of albuminous combination of carbon. In other words, like a piece of microscopic jello. And when people thought of organs and organisms, they'd probably think of roadkill that sees squishy stuff on a road.
They weren't thinking in terms of molecular machines, but it just turned out that that's what gets life moving. And that is a big clue if you think of what it takes to make a machine in our everyday world. That's a big clue about how machines must have gotten made in life as well.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so, so is it fair to say that you helped introduce the idea of molecular machines to the general reader?
Were there other books out there sort of exploring this or were you on the cutting edge there?
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Well I, I certainly focused on it because if you look in the dictionary and for a def machine it the definition is, you know, an entity that has several separate parts that work with each other to perform work, either mechanical work or electrical work or other such things.
So it was central to my argument that the fact that machines exist in this cell is a big monkey wrench in Darwin's theory. Because if machines can be made gradually because they all contain all of separate parts by definition, almost so pretty much Darwin's theory of tiny little steps over long periods of time is exactly what you don't expect to be able to produce what has been discovered in the cell.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: That was the first half of my conversation with Dr. Behe about the incredible arguments and impact of his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, now celebrating its 30th anniversary. And as he just mentioned, the discovery of molecular machines at the biochemical heart of life was indeed a huge monkey wrench in Darwin's theory. Don't miss the second half of our discussion. Next I ask Mike about another concept he introduced in Darwin's black box. The notion of, of irreducible complexity. He also talks about how his arguments in the book have withstood criticism and the test of time over the last 30 years and how his two follow up books complement and expand on the arguments he laid out in Darwin's black box. So don't miss part two in a separate episode. In the meantime, get a copy of Darwin's black box at Dr. Behe's website, Michael behe.org that's michaelbehe.org for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
