Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution Book

As an evolutionary biologist I feel obligated to review this book. Behe really does give a valuable critique of evolutionary theory by giving canonical examples of systems that he believes cannot evolve.

Behe's thesis is weak in the sense that he doesn't discredit evolution, he simply thinks there are cases that evolution cannot handle at the level of cellular systems (A strong version would argue that evolution is impossible or not true).

What makes the book valuable is that it shines a light on a real scientific problem: the evolution of complex biochemical systems. Researchers are just beginning to tackle this problem because it is finally becoming tractable, with the development with fancy genomic/proteomic technologies that hope to fully examine the interactions occurring between genes and molecules in the cell.

Are some biochemical systems irreducibly complex? I doubt it. The state of the art in a 100 years (probably less) should conquer Behe's objections.

The main problem I have with Behe is how he attacks the scientific literature for not attacking the problems he poses, when they have been intractable up until now. It is impossible to give a step-by-step explanation for the evolution of a system, when all the intermediates have long been gone. Evolutionary biologists try to infer this information by comparing genetic sequence, research which Behe quickly papers over by saying that a third of papers published in JME (Journal of Molecular Evolution) simply compare gene and protein sequences. As a biochemist, Behe completely ignores the overwhelming evidence for evolution from genetics. When the problem of how protein sequence codes for protein function is one of the great unsolved mysteries in modern science, looking for evolutionary evidence in modern biochemistry is barking up the wrong tree. We simply don't know how changes in gene sequence over evolutionary time affects how proteins function in their systems context. Behe jumps to design when the groundwork he needs to argue coherently for design (or for evolution) in his examples simply does not exist.

Now that this groundwork is finally being done, Behe's particular argument for design can be settled the old fashioned way--through hard scientific work--in the coming century. Behe is guilty of a cardinal scientific sin: jumping to conclusions without having real empirical data to back up his claim.

NOTE: one of the problems with evolutionary biology is that all living things share the genetic code, meaning that arguing what existed before the LUCA (last universal common ancestor) is pure speculation. Behe might believe that the LUCA (and its genetic code) was designed, and everything else evolved from it. The problem is that there is no hard evidence for how it all happened, just educated guesses. This is where Behe's criticism is best, but it is also where it is the most meaningless. For a interesting hypothesis (which is probably wrong in many respects) on the evolution of the genetic code, check out this paper: "On the origin of the translation system and the genetic code in the RNA world by means of natural selection, exaptation, and subfunctionalization." Wolf YI, Koonin EV. Biol Direct. 2007 May 31;2:14.