"Darwin's Black Box" (1996) was at least an interesting thought experiment. Behe argued that biological organisms need all their parts in order to function: if one part is missing, they just can't exist (let alone survive, let alone reproduce). The argument was flawed, as countless biologists have proven. However, Behe did strike a chord, as one wonders what are the odds that natural selection alone would produce complex beings that rely on so many organs to survive. It is now commonly accepted that more forces must be at work. Darwin himself (in his second and less famous book) had already realized this, and proposed that sexual selection be the second formidable force at work. Behe's first book was, if nothing else, based on science.

Behe's new work, "The Edge of Evolution" (2007), whose new claim is that there aren't enough mutations available in the DNA to account for life's diversity, is instead a book based on a grotesquely twisted interpretation of Darwin's theory and on (quite simply) very bad mathematics. Only religious fanatics will find anything of value in this delirious hipe of pseudo-scientific distortions.

TM, ®, Copyright © 2006 Piero Scaruffi