Michael Behe

Dr. Michael J. Behe is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He is a prominent advocate of the pseudoscience Intelligent Design, having coined the term irreducible complexity and testified as an expert witness and co-author of the intelligent design textbook that was the subject of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District litigation. He is a fellow of the Discovery Institute and his work is mentioned various times in the Discovery Institute's Wedge Document.

The vast majority of scientists regard Behe's positions on intelligent design as pseudoscientific and unfalsifiable. The Lehigh University Department of Biological Sciences, where Behe is a tenured professor, has seen fit to prominently dissociate itself from Behe's views on intelligent design. Behe acknowledges that most of his colleagues disagree with him.


 * "The department faculty...are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific." - Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University.

Prominent works
In 1996, Behe authored Darwin's Black Box, which argued that biological systems were irreducibly complex and therefore could not have evolved. Controversial when published, many of the claims in the book have since been refuted, as Behe himself admitted during the Dover trial (see below).

Behe's second book The Edge of Evolution, published in 2007, abandons many of his earlier positions, to formulate a new idea of the intelligent designer as the "great mutator," driving the mutations which drive evolution. The abdication of his former ideas, and the substitution of such a weak and strange theory, led Richard Dawkins to refer to him as "a man who has given up."

More recently, Behe lent his services to ISKCON, authoring a chapter in a book entitled "Rethinking Darwin: A Vedic Study of Darwinism and Intelligent Design" for the "Bhaktivedanta Book Trust." . A pre-release review of his third book, Darwin Devolves (2019), in the magazine Science says it "misrepresents theory and ignores evidence."

The Dover trial
Behe served as an expert witness for the defense in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial. Under cross examination, he was obliged to admit:


 * That no peer-reviewed scientific journal has published research supportive of intelligent design's claims.
 * That Behe's own book was not, as he had claimed, peer reviewed.
 * That Behe himself criticizes the science presented as supporting intelligent design in instructional material created for that purpose.
 * That intelligent design seems plausible and reasonable to inquirers in direct proportion to their belief or nonbelief in God.
 * That the basic arguments for evidence of purposeful design in nature are essentially the same as those adduced by the Christian apologist Rev. William Paley (1743–1805) in his 1802 Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected From the Appearances of Nature, where he sums up his observations of the complexity of life in the ringing words, "The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD."
 * That the definition of "theory" supplied by the US National Academy of Sciences did not encompass ID, and that his broader definition would allow astrology to be included as a scientific theory.
 * That he had claimed in his book that evolution could not explain immunology without even investigating the subject. When presented with 58 peer reviewed articles, nine books, and several textbook chapters on the subject, he insisted they were "not good enough."

What kind of scientist is Michael Behe?
A bad one, apparently.

Associate Professor Dr. David Lampe, of Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), did a review of Michael Behe's work from 1996 to 2005 to determine how productive he is as a scientist. The study was based on how much work he had published in peer review journals, how many of his articles were referenced in further scientific research, and total number of publications. To establish a baseline, Lampe used Sean B. Carroll of the University of Wisconsin, who studies the developmental basis of evolutionary biology. He summarizes his findings as follows:

Lampe's footnote in the original reads:

"Academic freedom" vs. freedom of conscience — which is a more basic right?
Despite Behe's involvement with a movement that pretends to be about "academic freedom" and the freedom to question "orthodoxies," Behe apparently does not extend such freedoms to members of his own family. Behe's then 19 year old son, Leo Behe, rejected Catholicism in favor of atheism; for his pains he claims he was made a pariah in his family and compelled to reside in the basement. Apparently, for him, you are only free to think what you think if you think the same as he does.

On November 6, 2010, Leo Behe called in to the Atheist Community of Austin's Non-Prophets radio show and spoke with Matt Dillahunty, Russell Glasser, and Dennis Loubet. Leo described the quest that led to him rejecting his Catholic faith actually started as an effort to engage in apologetics. At the beginning of his investigation, he was