Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996)

By Michael Behe - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

The Journal of Molecular Evolution has been publishing exclusively on the molecular origins of life since 1971. A thousand papers per decade appear in its pages, under an editorial board that includes a dozen members of the National Academy of Sciences. Over the entire life of the journal, not one paper has proposed a detailed model by which any complex biochemical system might have been produced in a gradual Darwinian fashion. Not a thin record. Not a disputed record. Empty. The same result holds for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for academic books, for Cold Spring Harbor symposia. What has been published is sequence comparison, mathematical modeling, and origin-of-life chemistry that grows more elaborate the longer it is pursued. What has not been published is any account of how the cilium, the bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, the vesicular transport system, or the biosynthetic pathway that makes a single nucleotide could have been assembled step by step. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, published in 1996 with a substantial afterword added in 2006, is the book that documented the absence and named what it meant.

Michael Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University. His argument does not depend on a religious commitment, and he says so directly on the sixth page. He accepts that the universe is billions of years old, finds the idea of common descent fairly convincing, and holds no brief for young-earth creationism. His disagreement with Darwinism begins where the mechanism is asked to build the machinery on which life runs, and it is made from within the field that studies that machinery. He works with the same journals, the same textbooks, and the same molecular structures as the biochemists who accept the standard account. His book is a report from inside the discipline about what the discipline has and has not established.

Biochemistry as a field opened its central subject only after the mid-1950s. Until then the cell was a black box in the strict sense — a device that did something whose inner workings could not be seen. Ernst Haeckel had thought the cell a homogeneous globule of protoplasm. Thomas Huxley had thought life might arise spontaneously from sea mud. On those assumptions, Darwin’s mechanism of small variations acted on by natural selection was easy to imagine at the molecular foundation, because the foundation seemed to have no structure to explain. What appeared once the box was opened was not protoplasm. It was tiny protein machines with matched parts, coordinated timing, and functions that vanish when any critical component is removed. By 1996 the shapes and mechanisms of thousands of these machines had been worked out. The evolutionary account had not caught up, and Behe went looking in the professional literature to see what had been said. This book is the record of what he found and what he did not find.

The book sits alongside other documents of establishment dissent from Darwinian gradualism — James Shapiro on the directed rearrangements cells perform on their own DNA, Gould and Eldredge on the fossil record’s stubborn refusal to show gradual transitions, the mathematicians who told the biologists at the 1966 Wistar Institute symposium that their numbers did not work and were told the numbers must be wrong. The full summary reconstructs the bacterial flagellum as a rotary motor driven by acid flow across the membrane, requiring roughly forty proteins for function; walks through Russell Doolittle’s proposed evolutionary account of blood clotting and the three problems that demolish it; traces the mechanism by which the body assembles ten billion different antibody combinations from four hundred gene segments; and follows Francis Crick, Nobel laureate and codiscoverer of DNA’s structure, to the point where he proposes that life on earth was seeded by spores sent from another planet because he judges the undirected origin of life on earth to be insurmountable and wants a naturalistic explanation. The most successful biochemistry textbook of the last several decades, Lehninger’s, contains six thousand index entries. Two of them are for evolution.

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