Michael J. Behe

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

Michael J. Behe is Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Behe's current research involves delineation of design and natural selection in protein structures.

In his career he has authored over 40 technical papers and two books, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution and The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, which argue that living system at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of deliberate intelligent design. Most recently, in Darwin Devolves, Behe advances his argument, presenting new research that offers a startling reconsideration of how Darwin’s mechanism works, weakening the theory’s validity even more.

The books have been reviewed by the New York Times, Nature, Philosophy of Science, Christianity Today, and many other periodicals. Darwin's Black Box was internationally reviewed in over one hundred publications and named by National Review and World magazine as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.

Behe has presented and debated his work at major universities throughout North America and England.

Archives

Michael Behe: Behind The Scenes of Secrets of the Cell

Michael Behe
November 8, 2023
If Charles Darwin could have peered into one of today's high-powered microscopes and seen the stunning complexity and function in even the simplest living cells, On the Origin of Species might have been a very different book! On this ID The Future, we go behind the scenes with biochemist Michael Behe to discuss his popular video series Secrets of the Cell. From overseeing intricate animation work to driving off-road in a Jeep through the backwoods, Dr. Behe spills some secrets of his own about his experience getting in front of the camera to bring the wonders of the cell to life.

Michael Behe on the Origin of Biological Information

Michael Behe
September 25, 2023
Just what is information? Why is so much of it needed for life? And where did it all come from? On this ID The Future, we're pleased to rebroadcast in audio form the latest episode in biochemist Michael Behe's Secrets of the Cell series on the mystery of biological information. In this episode, Behe starts by explaining just what information actually is. From the decision to flip a switch to the thousands of decisions needed to build complex structures, information is everywhere in our world, and it also runs the show in the hidden inner world of cells. Behe describes how cells manage information to build tissues, organs, and systems. He also explains that each cell is part of a massive collaboration of trillions of cells, where the right information at the right time flows through us in the form of chemical and electrical signals, activating different energy modes and keeping our entire body functioning efficiently. To conclude, Behe invites us to join him for a sobering thought experiment: attempting to build an instruction manual for a human femur bone. Sounds simple enough in theory. It's just a bone, after all! But Behe reminds us of the many layers of complexity inherent in making even a single bone part of a larger, dynamic, and coordinated living system. Complex machines and working structures, says Behe, are possible only through specific code that determines form and function. And our uniform and repeated experience affirms that specified or functional information always arises from an intelligent source, not a strictly material process.

Even More Mammoth Devolution

Michael Behe
April 11, 2023
The lesson from woolly mammoth studies, and many other ones, is that it is much faster and easier to break or blunt a gene than to improve or make a new one.

Michael Behe and Michael Medved Explore Secrets of the Cell

Michael Behe
October 31, 2022
On today’s ID the Future, Michael Medved interviews biologist Michael Behe about Behe’s visually stunning YouTube series, Secrets of the Cell. Behe summarizes one of the key messages of the video series, namely that everything from the life-essential blood clotting system to a myriad of crucial protein structures in our bodies increasingly appear to be far beyond the reach of blind evolutionary mechanisms to build. Instead they appear to be the work of planning and purpose, which is the purview of mind. Meanwhile, even many mainstream evolutionists are growing skeptical of neo-Darwinism, Behe says, as biologists continue to uncover more and more layers of cellular sophistication. The emerging field of metagenomics, he says, is a case in point. Medved also mentions a recent article …

Behe Counters the Best Objections to Irreducible Complexity and ID, Pt 3

Michael Behe
September 26, 2022
On today’s ID the Future biologist Michael Behe and Philosophy for the People host Pat Flynn conclude their conversation (posted by permission here) about some of the best objections to Behe’s central case for intelligent design. One objection Behe and Flynn tackle in this episode: the idea of evolution overcoming the irreducible-complexity hurdle through co-option. That is, maybe the precursors to what would become one of today’s molecular machines, such as the bacterial flagellum motor, co-opted simpler machines being used for other purposes, allowing evolution to build a bacterial flagellum motor one small step at a time over thousands or millions of generations, even though the completed bacterial flagellum ceases to function at all when just one of its many key …

Behe Counters the Best Objections to Irreducible Complexity and ID, Pt 2

Michael Behe
September 21, 2022
Today’s ID the Future continues A Mousetrap for Darwin author Michael Behe’s conversation with philosopher Pat Flynn, focused on some of the more substantive objections to Behe’s case for intelligent design in biology. In this segment the pair discuss the bacterial flagellum, the cilium, and the blood clotting cascade, and tackle critiques from Alvin Plantinga, Graham Oppy, Russell Doolittle, Kenneth Miller, and others. This interview is posted here by permission of Pat …

Behe Answers the Best Objections to Irreducible Complexity and ID, Pt. 1

Michael Behe
September 19, 2022
On today’s ID the Future Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe addresses what Philosophy for the People host Pat Flynn considers some of the best objections to Behe’s central intelligent design argument. As far back as the 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, Behe has argued that certain features in biology are irreducibly complex. That is, they require numerous essential parts, each carefully fitted to its task and integrated with the other parts, in order for the molecular machine or system to function at all. Two examples are the bacterial flagellum motor and the blood clotting cascade. Such systems are, in Behe’s words, irreducibly complex and could not have arisen through any blind and gradual evolution process. The better explanation for their origin: intelligent design. Since …

Behe and Ramage: Evolution’s Limits and the Fingerprints of Design

Michael Behe
August 31, 2022
Today’s ID the Future wraps up a debate over evolution and intelligent design between Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe and Benedictine College theologian Michael Ramage. Both Behe and Ramage are Catholic, and they carry on their conversation in the context of Catholic thinking about nature and creation, in particular the work of Thomas Aquinas and contemporary Thomist philosophers. Ramage seeks to integrate his Thomistic/personalist framework with modern evolutionary theory’s commitment to macroevolution and common descent. Behe doesn’t discount the possibility of common descent but lays out a case that any evolution beyond the level of genus (for instance, the separate families containing cats and dogs) cannot be achieved through mindless Darwinian mechanisms and, instead, …

Behe and Ramage Debate, Pt. 2: Evolution, ID, and Aquinas

Michael Behe
August 29, 2022
Today’s ID the Future continues the conversation between Catholic intelligent design biologist Michael Behe and Catholic theologian Matthew Ramage. Both agree that nature points to a cosmic designer, but Ramage says he prefers, on aesthetic grounds, the idea that the biological realm has the capacity, gifted by God, to evolve on its own without the need for intervention by God. Behe notes that people have different aesthetic predilections, but it’s the scientist’s job not to figure out how he would have preferred things to have happened in nature, but to discover how they actually did come about. Behe also says that while the sun, moon, and stars do move according to fixed natural laws, it doesn’t follow from this that the many complex forms we find in biology arose purely …

Michael Behe and Matthew Ramage Debate Evolution and ID, Pt. 1

Michael Behe
August 24, 2022
Today’s ID the Future brings the first part of a friendly debate/discussion between Lehigh University biologist and intelligent design proponent Michael Behe and Catholic theologian Matthew Ramage. Led by Philosophy for the People podcast host Pat Flynn, Behe starts by noting that he is a lifelong Catholic who accepted from childhood that, as he was taught in school, if God wanted to work through the secondary causes of Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms to generate the diversity of life, who were we to tell him he shouldn’t or couldn’t do it that way? Behe says that his skepticism toward Neo-Darwinism arose many years later and stemmed purely from his scientific research. Ramage, who specializes in the work of Pope Benedict XVI, sees God as indispensable to creation but also …

Michael Behe: Evolution, Devolution, Design

Michael Behe
August 22, 2022
Today’s ID the Future features three recent Evolution News essays by Lehigh University biology professor and Darwin Devolves author Michael Behe, as read by host Andrew McDiarmid. In the first, nothing shows the feebleness of Darwinism quite so much as breathless stories about new results that turn out to be much ado about nothing. In this case, it’s some recent speculation about the rise of “lactase persistence” in many human adults. Then it’s onto malaria, much beloved of evolutionists, not for its lethality but as a demonstration of evolution in action. But Behe dissects the latest news story on the topic to show that the touted malaria evolution is, once again, malaria gnawing off the proverbial leg to achieve a niche advantage—that is, mere devolution. It’s …

Behe: Bacteriophage—The New Poster Child for Darwin’s Doom

Michael Behe
March 16, 2022
On today’s ID the Future, Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe argues that Darwinism was built on a foundation of ignorance. Through no fault of Darwin’s, neither he nor anyone else in his day had a clue about the nature of cellular life and biological information, says Behe. Even the biologists of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis in the first half of the twentieth century were fairly clueless about the foundation of life, Behe says. When researchers did finally begin to unravel the sophisticated foundations of life, earlier notions of how evolutionary processes might have invented the great diversity of life forms on earth were exposed as causally inadequate. Behe says that in fact all the attempts to rescue the idea of mindless macroevolution have been exposed as inadequate by …

Two Recent Papers Buttress Behe’s Darwin Devolves Thesis

Michael Behe
November 24, 2021
On today’s ID the Future Darwin Devolves author and biologist Michael Behe discusses two recent technical papers that the news media billed as dramatic evidence for evolution. As Behe explains in his conversation with host Eric Anderson, a careful look at the papers themselves shows that both cases involve devolution. That is, the biological forms in question did not evolve novel structures and information; instead they threw away things to achieve a niche advantage. In the first study, in the journal Nature Microbiology, the researchers found that in Africa, where “most rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for falciparum malaria recognize histidine-rich protein 2 antigen,” the malaria parasite has repeatedly evolved a way to sometimes elude detection, giving it a selective advantage, …

Darwin Devolves Author Michael Behe Tangles with Two Philosophers, Pt. 3

Michael Behe
July 30, 2021
On this ID the Future, ID biologist Michael Behe continues fielding tough questions from philosophers Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. Here in Part 3 of 3, Behe responds to the claim that some designs in biology are bad designs and to criticisms leveled at ID from some Thomists. Also in the mix, the issue of academic pressure to distance oneself from ID, even before those involved understand what the theory of intelligent design actually is. Madden also asks Behe what reforms he’d pursue if he suddenly found himself in charge of the National Academy of Sciences. Tune in to hear Behe’s response, and much more. This three-part series is borrowed, with permission, from Flynn’s podcast, which can be found on his YouTube …

ID Pioneer Michael Behe Tangles with Two Philosophers, Pt. 2

Michael Behe
July 28, 2021
In today’s ID the Future, intelligent design pioneer Michael Behe continues his conversation with philosophers Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. Here in Part 2 of a three-part series, Behe offers an illustration from language and Madden presses him, noting that meaning detection in language is not parts to whole. A lively exchange ensues and then Behe turns the discussion back to his primary focus, detecting design in molecular biological machines by recognizing the purposeful arrangement of parts. From there the conversation turns to everything from epigenetics, systems biology, and autopoiesis to co-option, mousetraps, tie clips, biologist Kenneth Miller, and the philosophers Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. For Behe’s newest book, A Mousetrap for Darwin, go here. This …

Biologist Michael Behe Tangles with Two Philosophers, Pt. 1

Michael Behe
July 26, 2021
Today’s ID the Future features Darwin Devolves author and Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe speaking about the logic and evidence of intelligent design with two philosophers, Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. In a friendly, stimulating exchange, Flynn and Madden press Behe with objections — some philosophic, others scientific — to see how well his position stands up to scrutiny from experts who have engaged the subject. Here in Part 1 of a three-part series, Behe counters the charge that ID is an argument from ignorance, and then the three men compare the contemporary design argument to philosopher Thomas Aquinas’s fifth way. For Behe’s newest book, A Mousetrap for Darwin, go here. This discussion is presented here with permission of philosopher and podcaster Pat …