Rating: 
Summary: Fear only those who are blind
Review: A few points. Behe is Catholic, and therefore is a Creationist. That is Catholic dogma. However, in his book, he is careful to avoid religion and therefore the Intelligent Designer is not identified. This is a purely scientific discussion. Behe has all the biology he needs to appreciate this subject. It is the evolutionary biologists who are lacking since they don't have any credentials when it comes to biochemistry.
Behe bases his arguments on proteins, not amino acids or simple molecules. Proteins have primary, secondary, and tertiary structures. If one atom is out of place, the protein doen't fold and you get a blob that is detrimental to an organism. When you have a complex cellular machine which requires multiple proteins to have exact shapes, the possibility of gradual evolution goes to zero. If one atom in multiple complex proteins is out of place, you don't get a lower level of vision, you get blindness. Even if evolution is correct, this book will do a lot to stimulate science and open up new understandings. Are the evolutionists afraid of the challenge?
Rating: 
Summary: Behe Has A Theory?
Review: A recent reviewer suggests that Behe's "theory should be judged on it's [sic] own merit." In fact, most of Behe's book is devoted, not to his own theory, but to a sustained rhetorical attack on Darwin's. He doesn't get around to proposing a positive theory himself until page 227 (paperback edition), and it only amounts to a paragraph or so.
"Suppose that nearly four billion years ago, the designer made the first cell, already containing all of the irreducibly complex biochemical systems discussed here and many others .. additionally .. the designer placed into the cell some other systems for which we cannot adduce enough evidence to conclude design .. The cell containing the designed systems then was left on autopilot to reproduce, mutate, eat and be eaten, bump against rocks, and suffer all the vagaries of life on earth." (pp. 227-228).
Pseudogenes, the "gene-look-alike junk DNA" that constitutes the great majority of the genetic material in contemporary multi-cellular organisms, represent one of those striking biochemical imperfections that raise questions about the "intelligence" in intelligent design. Behe theorizes that the accumulation of pseudogenes probably occurred through later mutational deterioration of a number of the originally designed systems. This supposedly demonstrates that "the theory of intelligent design is seen to be quite robust, easily answering the argument from imperfection" (p. 228).
The large preponderance of junk over functional DNA is only a tiny fraction of the evidence for design imperfection in living systems. Behe himself likens the complex triggers in the blood-clotting cascade to the comic serendipity of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, yet fails to see the irony. As Dr. Karen Bartelt notes, Behe's critics aren't being unreasonable in "asking nothing but that an 'intelligent designer' design intelligently!"
Aside from this, there are serious defects in Behe's theoretic scenario as it stands. First, the genetic material for this primordial super-cell would have to hold thousands of times more information than we find in any modern single-celled organism. There is no evidence that such an organism ever existed, and good reason to think it never could. The burden of resources required to support and transmit these massive stores of DNA, without any benefit at all to the organisms involved, so they could be passed on to potential descendants millions or billions of years into the future, suggests a profoundly flawed design.
Second, we would expect the gene complex for, say, the vertebrate blood-clotting cascade, stable enough to persist for well over three and a half billion years until the arrival of vertebrates, to show some persistence for another few hundred million years, down to the present day. But we find no trace of these genes in any living system outside the vertebrates themselves who actually depend on them.
Third, the unexpressed ('turned off') genetic material would accumulate mutations that would not be pruned from the gene pool by being exposed to natural selection processes. These genes would be turned into "junk DNA" long before they could ever be used. This deterioration effect has been experimentally confirmed for genes whose expression is suppressed for very much shorter periods of time than this. Behe's explanation of pseudogenes refers to this effect, so he is clearly aware of it. But he gives no account of how his irreducibly complex systems were protected from it for billions of years.
These difficulties are so elementary that it's hard to imagine Behe seriously intends a scientific audience with this proposal. My general impression is he doesn't care what the scientists think. While the scientific community (including biochemists) is nearly unanimous in accepting evolution as a fact, a sizeable majority of the American public does not accept it. In this book, Behe's telling these folks exactly what they want to hear.
Behe's analysis doesn't present a genuine scientific alternative to current evolutionary theory. His cynical manipulation of science to exploit and even encourage pseudo-scientific thinking in the public mind is exasperating. The controversy isn't between one theory and another; it's between science and pseudo-science. It's unfortunate that the pseudo-science of intelligent design just happens to be of great interest to people of a particular religious mindset, whose faith apparently depends on the science being wrong.
The reviewer I mentioned seems oblivious to the science involved. But then there's the interesting case of another reviewer, a biochemist bereft of even a basic knowledge of evolutionary theory, of population genetics, of cell biology - seemingly of any science at all outside the realm of his specialty.
He asks ".. if it's true that everything that can be formed by matter, will be formed if given sufficient time .. recall monkeys pounding on typewriters for an infinite length of time .. what do I think I might see?" He then goes on to describe a bizarre scenario of the "all possible worlds" sort, with no understanding of the various kinds of constraints - genealogical, ecological, structural-functional, competitive, etc. - entailed in the learning algorithm known as "natural selection". To him it's all random accidents (a common thread of argument among creationists). In fact, the random genetic fluctuations only provide the raw material, grist for the mill of natural selection.
A recent reviewer describes how a 'natural selection'-like algorithm applied to randomly generated letters was able to produce a perfect copy of Hamlet within hours. The analogy doesn't capture natural selection's open-endedness, but it certainly answers the tiresome monkeys-and-typewriters ("argument from improbability") fallacy, which omits the role of natural selection entirely. Dembski's "specified complexity" is a dolled-up version of this old creationist argument, and Behe himself uses it at one point in his book (pp. 93-94).
Our biochemist reviewer also asserts "'That it exists' does not constitute proof that it outcompeted ANYTHING to be here in its present form." But it's not just 'that it exists' that constitutes the proof. It's that we can trace "family resemblances" (genetic lineages) among present forms back hundreds of millions of years, and correlate these with the fossil record and geological data, to trace the course of the evolution. No creationist theory can account for this data. It can only deny it, as young-earth creationists do, or sidestep it, as Behe does. To date, only evolutionary theory describes a plausible dynamic for the 'common descent' of organisms, the concept of which Behe himself says, "I find the idea .. fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it." (p. 5). As we've seen, his own theoretical account is anything but plausible.
Rating: 
Summary: As Recommended by the Editors of Scientific Kansas
Review: A thorough and disciplined critic of the theory of natural section at the biochemical level perhaps. But when he gets to his arguments in favor of his counter-theory, well, he sounds like a rhetorically nimble Jesuit. See his recent New York Times op-ed piece for a concise summation of his logic.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Argument, So-So Writing
Review: Behe presents a solid challenge to a Darwinian view of how life started on Earth (though he leaves the question of how it could begin elsewhere unchallenged). Unfortunately to do this, he relies on several esoteric biochemical processes (though i think that is the only sort of biochemical processes available to a neophyte like myself). The first half of the book reads as several iterations of the same argument, though delivered with increasing amounts of sarcasm. The second half of the book, in which he delivers his answer to the questions raised earlier, seems rushed. So if you tire of the seemingly endless stream of enzymes and proteins, skip to the second part -- it's much easier reading for the layperson.Though to say that this book disproves or even dismisses evolution and natural selection as viable scientific theories is disingenuous at best, and dishonest at worst. Behe even says that beyond a limited set of structures that appear to be evidence of intelligent design, there are many structures that are not clearly designed (and most likely aren't, he admits). To explain these structures and organisms, he gives a variety of options, ending with what is clearly natural selection, though he declines to name it as such. Finally, while criticising evolutionary proponents for attacking a straw man (the watchmaker for darwinists, Richard Dawkins for intelligent design-ists), this is exactly what he does -- since Darwin's followers haven't demonstrated a valid argument/scenario for the basic structures of the cell, then entire theory is invalid (including portions that have been experimentally shown true on an organism level). Finally, Behe doesn't give any sort of explanation or theory for how some basic structures of the cell are evidence of design, but others are not. He implies that those not showing evidence of design could have evolved, but does not explain why some more complicated structures could be designed before other more basic structures evolved. Enjoy this book and the questions it opens, but it is far from the final word on the origins and progression of life on Earth (just as Dawkins' books aren't, either).
Rating:
Summary: A reply to the prominent first review
Review: He assumes that a single insitution's study alone proves the mathematical impossibility of evolution because a brute random version of evolution would take impossibly wrong. This is a strawman argument.
Some had compared the odds of life randomly assembling to some monkeys pounding on a few typewriters, hoping to somehow recreate the lingual, semantic, literary 'irreducible' complexity of "Hamlet". A researcher took them up on it: he used a program where only the fittest (most Hamlet-y) letters survived. It took only a few hours to produce a perfect copy.
Evolution does not create whole, random objects. Copious incremental variations do the trick. It has been proven far better than a few erroneous calculations by a questionable institute fifty years ago.
Rating:
Summary: Scientific Knowledge Shouldn't Be Decided By Popular Vote
Review: I can appreciate that Michael Behe's supporters might fail to grasp the effectiveness of some of the more technical refutations of this book that have been presented. But I'd expect others - like those of cell biologist Kenneth R. Miller, for instance - to be readily understandable by anyone capable of following Behe's own rather difficult arguments. Miller has won several awards for outstanding teaching, and is co-author of well-received high school and college textbooks. He can communicate. He's also a conscientious Roman Catholic, acutely aware of the conflicts that can arise when sincere religious convictions confront the sometimes disturbing and often counter-intuitive findings of modern science. A little sampler from Miller's writings may hopefully stir the more conscientious among Behe's sympathizers to look into what Miller and other interested scientists have to say about the book and about the intelligent design argument in general. In March 2002, Miller and physicist Lawrence Krauss took part in a debate before the Ohio Board of Education. Their opponents were Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells, senior fellows (as is Behe) at the Discovery Institute. The Institute, ID's home base, is a 'think tank' advocating what it calls "the renewal of science and culture". Its primary funding comes from wealthy conservative Christians, notably Christian Reconstructionists Roberta and Howard Ahmanson. Miller wrote a blow-by-blow account after the debate (the full text is on his website), in which he recalls Krauss' insight that "the two-on-two format of this presentation wouldn't render a fair picture of the sentiment in the scientific community. A more reasonable arrangement .. would have one member of the Discovery Institute on one side, and ten thousand scientists on the other .. two of the Discovery Institute's nine senior fellows were the ID speakers who were there; if they had not been there, the only place to find more advocates for ID would be back at the Discovery Institute. If Krauss or I had not been there, however, we could have been replaced by scores of scientists from just about any college or university anywhere in the state of Ohio." In another article, "Answering the Biochemical Argument From Design" (also on his website), Miller gives Behe credit for recognizing that "the mere existence of structures and pathways that have not yet been given step-by-step Darwinian explanation does not make much of a case against evolution. Critics of evolution have laid down such challenges before, only to see them backfire when new scientific work provided exactly the evidence they had demanded. Behe himself once made a similar claim when he challenged evolutionists to produce transitional fossils linking the first fossil whales with their supposed land-based ancestors. Ironically, not one, not two, but three transitional species between whales and land-dwelling Eocene mammals had been discovered by the end of 1994 when his challenge was published." Darwin's theory states that "evolution produces complex organs though a series of fully-functional intermediate stages. If each of the intermediate stages can be favored by natural selection, then so can the whole pathway." Behe argues that due to the "irreducible complexity" of biochemical systems like those described in his book, there can be no fully-functional intermediate stages; all parts must be present for any function at all. Miller asks, "Is there something different about biochemistry, a reason why Darwin's answer would not apply to the molecular systems that Behe cites? "In a word, no. "In 1998, Siegfried Musser and Sunney Chan described the evolutionary development of the cytochrome c oxidase protein pump, a complex, multipart molecular machine that plays a key role in energy transformation by the cell. In human cells, the pump consists of six proteins, each of which is necessary for the pump to function properly. It would seem to be a perfect example of irreducible complexity. Take one part away from the pump, and it no longer works. And yet, these authors were able to produce, in impressive detail, "an evolutionary tree constructed using the notion that respiratory complexity and efficiency progressively increased throughout the evolutionary process". "In 1996, Enrique Meléndez-Hevia and his colleagues published, in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, a paper entitled "The puzzle of the Krebs citric acid cycle: Assembling the pieces of chemically feasible reactions, and opportunism in the design of metabolic pathways during evolution" .. this paper does exactly what Behe says cannot be done, even in principle - it presents a feasible proposal for its evolution from simpler biochemical systems .. what all of this means, of course, is that two principal claims of the intelligent design movement are disproved, namely that it is impossible to present a Darwinian explanation for the evolution of a complex biochemical system, and that no such papers appear in the scientific literature. It is possible, and such papers do exist." Miller shows in detail that even systems Behe proposes as "irreducibly complex" are not so. "Nature presents many examples of fully-functional cilia that are missing key parts .. this leaves us with two points to consider: First, a wide variety of motile systems exist that are missing parts of this supposedly irreducibly complex structure; and second, biologists have known for years that each of the major components of the cilium, including proteins tubulin, dynein, and actin have distinct functions elsewhere in the cell that are unrelated to ciliary motion .. what this means, of course, is that a selectable function exists for each of the major parts of the cilium, and therefore that the argument [for irreducible complexity] is wrong." Miller demonstrates similar difficulties with Behe's claim regarding the bacterial flagellum. He concludes, "At least four key elements of the eubacterial flagellum have other selectable functions in the cell that are unrelated to motility .. by demonstrating the existence of such functions, even in just a handful of components, we have invalidated the argument". Miller's verdict: "Prof. Behe argues that anti-religious bias is the reason the scientific community resists the explanation of design for his observations:
I would suggest that the actual reason is much simpler. The scientific community has not embraced the explanation of design because it is quite clear, on the basis of the evidence, that it is wrong."
Rating:
Summary: Emotional Reviews!
Review: Judging from the emotional reviews I've read here, there must be a great deal at stake in this debate. From the creationists point of view, there is an intense desire to fend off the assault of the culture, (evolution taught as fact), on his/her family, on their belief system and on their Bible with facts and logic. It's a matter of protection. The creationist desires to see their family, friends and neighbors insulated from what they see as a PHILOSOPHICAL, (not a scientific), attack that might drive their loved ones away from Christianity and toward an eternal and torturous end. For them, there is also the strong motivation to avoid the embarrassment of looking like a red-necked, red-state, uneducated idiot, (even though, ultimately the embarrassment will never happen if the evolutionists are right! Poof! You die; it's over, embarrassment and all!)
It is more difficult to discern what the evolutionist's motivation might be for criticizing the creationist's point of view. Perhaps the pursuit of "truth" is his motivation. That of course, could not be it, because the outright dismissal of those things that he cannot prove or see, would also preclude him from believing in evolution! The evolutionist has had to depend on those scientists, sources, studies and snippets of "evidence" that he CHOOSES, because they support his belief system. He has had to believe them by FAITH.
Concern for the intellectual well-being of others couldn't be their motivation, though they often feign some concern for "the children". If that were the reason for their protestations, they would merely have to wait but a short time to see the
Rating:
Summary: Misleading reviews
Review: Most people giving this one star state something along the lines of : Behe just wants to deceive you in to religion because he doesn't provide a designer (which is not part of the book, the book is a challenge TO evolution). See the end of this review on how Darwinism gained more acceptance not by fact, but by the same method Behe is using. Or that Behe's book has already been refuted, and provide no sources, which is not true because in the words of Dembski, "The idea of IC is still in discussion among Biologsts." Also, some reviews will try to invoke things such as "The Scopes Trial", but see Rodney Stark's book, "For The Glory of God" on why this example is factually devious, and many of these amples that are meant to invoke images of fanatics on the side of Behe and others are addressed in "Uncommon Dissent".
Too many reviewers are stating falsities and leaving one star with no reason. For instance, I will review Tim Beazley's review.
"Behe's first contention that "irreducibly complex" (IC) systems cannot evolve in a stepwise (Darwinian) manner has been thoroughly refuted"
This is false. See "Uncommon Dissent", edited by Dembski, Introduction xxvii.
"Creationist William Dembski, for example, identifies three separate ways for IC systems to evolve in a stepwise manner: incremental indispensability; scaffolding; and co-optation."
This information must have been put in simply to confuse the reader, because Dembski clearly supports IC from the book I cite above, and in his own books. So, while these ways are of evolving exist, they don't explain what's needed.
He then has assumed to "prove" his point based off horribly funny and incorrect information. Then goes on to state, "Creationist Scott Minnich, for example, has shown that Behe's prime example, the bacterial flagellum, still retains function even with 30 parts removed."
This creationist also accepts Behe's IC argument. So, what has this reviewer shown? That's he's good at tricking and/or lying. He doesn't even cite where he got this information, which must have been known to Behe, who probably already addressed it.
"Evolutionists, however, claim that there are dozens of such studies, and that Behe simply overlooked them."
One can claim anything they wish, we need examples. Plus, even evolutionists agree that they have not demonstrated how a lot of things could have evolved, but they say that it's too high of an expectation. Not only that, but Ronald R. Hirsch comes to the same conclusion that there are systems that can't be broken down, and he came to this conclusion separately from Behe.
And, finally, "Behe's entire approach, of analogizing biochemical "machines" to human-produced machines, is also problematic. Michael Denton, for example, a scientist that many creationists claim as one of their strongest supporters, completely rejects Behe's comparison of biochemical and human-produced systems"
Well, for one thing, consider the words of Roland F Hirch, "Words such as "machine", "factory" and "motor" are in common use, and a cellular function is best explained in terms of design of the machine(s responsible..."(Uncommon Dissent 224), and the president of the National Academy of Sciences Bruce Alberts says "...each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines." Michael Denton does indeed reject the analogy of machine, but he is in the absolute minority of the Intelligent Design movement. In fact, Ernst Mayr (see "What Makes Biology Unique?"), a complete evolutionist, totally rejects the ideas of Denton in this case (that biology has strict laws, which I also doubt). So, again, this reviewer is sadly mistaken and misleading.
And for the final critique of these reviewers that give this book one star with silly reasons, consider the words of Ernst Mayr, practically the most famous Darwinist of our day, "It must be admitted that Darwinism has achieved acceptance less by irrefutable proofs in its favor and more by the default of opposing theories." (Toward a new Philosophy of Biology, Harvard University Press, 1988). This basically states that because Intelligent Design (not in its present day form, and it wasn't called ID) didn't explain life, people accepted Darwinism . Now IDers are saying that Darwinian Evolution doesn't explain life on earth, so they accept Intelligent Design. So much for the critics who say "but they only critique Darwinism, and don't provide their own full theory", this is what Darwinism itself did. They also say Intelligent Design can't be proven or unproven, yet it can.
Rating:
Summary: Old wine, new bottles
Review: One would think that 80 years after the Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, that the Creationists would have given up. Their latest incarnation, proponents of Intelligent Design like the author of this book, are simply more devious. They could not prevent Darwin from being taught in the schools, so they want to present Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwin.
It is the purpose of science to explain how the world operates. The Theory of Intelligent Design explains nothing. It has nothing to do with science. It is thinly disguised religion, and has no place in a science class. If ID'ers want to teach their beliefs in parochial schools, fine. But beware, when their children transfer to college they are going to be laughing stocks.
Rating:
Summary: Dangerous and complete nonsense
Review: Please see a complete reubuttal to this book and other ID "science" at:
www.talkcreation.org
www.talkdesign.org
www.talkreason.org
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