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First, let's get one thing straight: Behe's book offers no comfort whatsoever to Creationism, which is fine with me. You see, I have had little problem with Darwin, even though I'm a religious guy. (Mormonism, unlike Christian Fundamentalism, has no problem with the idea that the seven days of creation weren't 24 hours long.) It seemed obvious to me that higher animals evolved from lower ones, and that natural selection clearly worked in the real world.

Oddly enough, Behe's book does not challenge either of these points. Right from the start, he tells the creationists to shut up and go away, because he believes in evolution and his book does not challenge evolution, it challenges Darwin's explanation of the mechanism of evolution.

From there, Behe goes on to explain precisely why, while natural selection clearly works, it does not in any way account for the preexisting conditions that must be in place before natural selection can have any effect. For a century and a half, science has been swallowing a camel and almost nobody questions it. For Darwin's theory of natural selection absolutely depends on having a variety of traits within a species that natural selection can select from. Furthermore, those variations have to arise incrementally and have benefits at each stage of development.

This seems to work at the level of gross anatomy — the long neck of the giraffe, for instance, would simply be natural selection of individuals that could reach taller trees, and whose shoulder and neck structures could support the greater weight of that long neck.

It's when you get to the molecular level — which of course was not remotely possible in Darwin's time — that you run into the problems of irreduceable systems. And Behe gives example after example of irreduceable systems which would only provide a survival advantage when present in their entirety. Thus, instead of evolving bit by bit, these changes could only happen all at once, and they are so complex and each part of the system is so essential and unique that no one has put forth any serious attempt at explaining why the parts of the system might have been selected for, so that they would be available to make the whole system.

Behe is quite aware that he is writing popular science, and helps the nontechnical reader through the technical parts. He even warns the defiantly nontechnical reader which sections to skip! Yet Behe is also definitely writing to the scientific community as a whole, offering them a slap in the face for behaving far too much like dogmatic religion. That is, Darwin, having been accepted, is not questioned now even when it is clear that his theory no longer fits. Since it is the duty of scientists to recognize when a theory no longer fits the data, it is unconscionable (in Behe's view) that nobody is mentioning the fact or trying to find alternate hypotheses.

The reasons are almost certainly social rather than scientific, of course. Nobody is going to get professional respect, let alone tenure, by trying to do research that will play into the hands of the creationists who want to wreck the teaching of science in the schools. But Behe's fervent point, with which I fully agree, is that science has to behave like science even when it sometimes gives temporary ammunition to the enemies of science. For if science allows political or social concerns to keep it from going where the evidence points, it has become just one more arcane priesthood that hides the truth because "the people aren't ready for it." There are plenty of unanswered questions in science, and every answer raises more questions; what science does not need are "mysteries" which no one dares to examine. Yet that is what the Darwin issue is becoming. Behe quotes example after example of scientists who supposedly deal with the irreduceable systems question with what can only be described as affirmations of faith. "Somehow" natural selection will be found to explain this too, the true believers say. That ain't science.

Behe's conclusion is that these irreduceable systems must have been designed, though he declines to name the designer. (Attention: Chris Carter, a future X-Files episode is available here.) I think that conclusion is premature. The only proven conclusion is that this is a very serious question which natural selection so far has been proven utterly incapable of answering. It needs to be worked on instead of being sidestepped by scientists. Because if Darwin is wrong — and it appears that he is — the science of biology has a huge hole that must be filled. Evolution is obvious, but the engine we thought was driving it has just fallen out and now we have no idea what's making it go.

http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/reviews96/behe.shtml