An Interview with Professor Michael Behe.

From phillybrurbs.com (via AP):


Excerpts from an Associated Press interview with Michael Behe, the Lehigh University biochemist and intelligent design advocate who is scheduled to testify this week in a landmark trial that will determine whether a Pennsylvania school district can tell its biology students about intelligent design.

On how his views changed after reading "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" by Michael Denton:

"It took me aback because I realized then that my acceptance of Darwinian evolution was not based on knowledge that I myself had but rather (on) taking people's sayso. ... I looked for an explanation of how the blood clotting system may have arisen and was astounded to find that there were no papers that did anything except kind of raise their hands and say things like, 'Isn't it great how natural selection has provided us with this system?' And now that I was no longer taking Darwin's theory as a given but was looking for evidence to support it, such assurances no longer did the trick. And so at that point I became very skeptical of Darwin's theory and started to think to myself that I was believing in this less because the evidence demanded it than for sociological reasons, (because) my teacher said so and everybody else believed it."

On how he arrived at intelligent design as an alternative:

"If your explanation for how it might have arisen from some unintelligent process is knocked away, then the conclusion of design is pretty obvious. It kind of jumps out at you. ... If you don't have Darwin's theory, if all you've got is promises and unconvincing assurances, what you're left with is the strong appearance of design."

On intelligent design's religious implications:

"Maybe it does have philosophical and theological implications but it does not arise from those considerations. It arises from the data, just like the Big Bang theory arose from the data."

Comparing intelligent design to the Big Bang theory:

"This struck many people, including physicists and scientists of the day, as having strong philosophical, perhaps even theological implications. Perhaps this was the creation, perhaps this was the beginning of everything. Because of that, many people didn't like this. What if physicists of the day said, 'Well, let's not be too hasty? This idea of the Big Bang has objectionable, extra-scientific implications; it's pointing beyond nature ... so we'll just put (it) on the shelf.' ... If they had done that then physicists would have missed out on a lot of progress that was made in the past 70 years or so. I view ID in the same way."

On being an academic who backs ID:

"It's dangerous to your career to be identified as an ID proponent. I had tenure when I wrote my book. But if you don't have tenure - if you're a graduate student or a post-doc or an assistant professor - my strong advice is to keep your thoughts to yourself. You're just asking for big trouble if you go public."

On the hostile attitude his colleagues at Lehigh exhibit toward his views:

"These days they are more concerned than they used to be. They fear that their own research and their own students will be tarred by the hostility that is directed at me within the scientific community. And I can sympathize with that."

On criticism that he doesn't do any scientific research to back up his claims:

"I refer to work that has been done by the entire scientific community over the past half century or so. In my view, that makes my argument stronger. This does not depend on some experiment that I ran in my laboratory, rather this is an argument based on the accumulated work of all of biological science over the past half century. That is a much stronger basis for an argument than a paper that I might publish somewhere."

On detecting design in living things:

"Intelligent design becomes apparent when you see a system that has a number of parts and you see the parts are interacting to perform a function."

On the Dover Area School District statement on intelligent design:

"The fact that most biology texts act more as cheerleaders for Darwin's theory rather than trying to develop the critical faculties of their students shows the need, I think, for such statements."