Dear Colleagues,

As what could have been a follow-up to Norm's
post, this article appeared in today's edition of the
New York Times.

Best regards,

Ken

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/opinion/07behe.html?th


An excerpt:

--snip--

Design for Living

By MICHAEL J. BEHE

Published: February 7, 2005

Bethlehem, Pa. - IN the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching
of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of
the rival theory of intelligent design. As one of the scientists who
have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have
found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what
it is not.

First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a
religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the
teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. For example, a
critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if
evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian
natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by
an omniscient creator. That's misleading. Intelligent design
proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection
completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt
that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing
about the religious concept of a creator.

Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on
physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The
argument for it consists of four linked claims. The first claim is
uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in
nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate
tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin
of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount
Rushmore.

Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even
someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as
designed. Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design
argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of
biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman
William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the
workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists
disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do
agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.

For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA,
once wrote that biologists must constantly remind themselves that
what they see was not designed but evolved. (Imagine a scientist
repeating through clenched teeth: "It wasn't really designed. Not
really.")

The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a
watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined. In
the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very
foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules. There are
little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little
outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.

In 1998 an issue of the journal Cell was devoted to molecular
machines, with articles like "The Cell as a Collection of Protein
Machines" and "Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks,
Springs and Things." Referring to his student days in the 1960's,
Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote
that "the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate
and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered." In
fact, Dr. Alberts remarked, the entire cell can be viewed as a
factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines,
each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. He
emphasized that the term machine was not some fuzzy analogy; it was
meant literally.

--snip--

Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh
University and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center
for Science and Culture, is the author of "Darwin's Black Box: The
Biochemical Challenge to Evolution."

Copyright (c) 2005 New York Times