The Case for a Creator (35 page)

“Irreducible complexity is a very relevant topic,” he commented as he gestured toward the bandage. “An irreducibly complex system just saved your life.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Blood clotting,” he said. “If your blood hadn’t clotted in the right place and in the right amount and at the right time, you would have bled to death. As it turns out, the system of blood clotting involves a highly choreographed cascade of ten steps that use about twenty different molecular components. Without the whole system in place, it doesn’t work.”

Suddenly, I felt a personal stake in the topic. “Tell me more,” I said.

“The real trick with blood clotting isn’t so much the clot itself—it’s just a blob that blocks the flow of blood—but it’s the regulation of the system,” he continued.

“If you make a clot in the wrong place—say, the brain or lung—you’ll die. If you make a clot twenty minutes after all the blood has drained from your body, you’ll die. If the blood clot isn’t confined to the cut, your entire blood system might solidify, and you’ll die. If you make a clot that doesn’t cover the entire length of the cut, you’ll die. To create a perfectly balanced blood-clotting system, clusters of protein components have to be inserted all at once. That rules out a gradualistic Darwinian approach and fits the hypothesis of an intelligent designer.”

Surely, I thought to myself, there must be another way. “Some scientists have proposed that a process called ‘gene duplication’ can account for the creation of new components for complex biological systems,” I said. “Why wouldn’t that work with blood clotting?”

Gene duplication can happen during the process of cell division when DNA is being copied from the original cell for use in the new cell. Occasionally, the process goes awry and a piece of DNA, perhaps a gene, is copied twice. This creates an extra gene. While the original gene can go about its pre-assigned role, the extra gene can drift and perhaps create a new function. Some scientists have theorized that this is how new components might be created for irreducible systems.

“Sure, gene duplication happens,” Behe replied. “But what the fans of gene duplication rarely recognize is that when you get a duplicated gene, you don’t get a new protein with new properties. You’ve got the same protein as before. And that’s a problem.”

I was having difficulty seeing why. “Could you explain that?” I asked.

He glanced down at the mousetrap, which was still sitting on his desk. “Let’s go back to the mousetrap analogy,” he said. “Suppose you have a one-component mousetrap, with two ends of a metal spring being bent and pressing against each other under tension so that if a mouse disturbs them, they’ll slip and spring and hopefully catch a paw or tail. And say you wanted to develop a more efficient two-component trap that has a wooden base as well as the spring.

“According to the concept of gene duplication, you would make a copy of the first spring. Now you’ve got two springs—except the second spring somehow becomes a wooden base. Do you see the conceptual disconnect? You can’t just say the spring somehow morphs into a wooden base without doing more than just saying, ‘gene duplication did it.’ The problem is, Darwinists don’t provide the details of how this can actually happen in the real world.

“When one scientist tried to come up with a step-by-step scenario of how blood-clotting could have developed, he couldn’t avoid generalizing by saying a component suddenly ‘appears,’ or ‘is born,’ or, ‘arises,’ or, ‘springs forth,’ or ‘is unleashed.’
¹²
What’s causing all of this springing forth and unleashing? There’s no meaningful explanation of what could have caused these steps to take place. These are details that doom these scenarios.

“And there are a lot more problems than that. How can blood clotting develop over time, step by step, when in the meantime the animal has no effective way to stop from bleeding to death whenever it’s cut? And when you’ve only got part of a system in place, the system doesn’t work, so you’ve got the components sitting around doing nothing—and natural selection only works if there is something useful right now, not in the future.

“Besides, at best the explanations that some people attempt are mere word pictures. In science we’re supposed to do experiments to show something is true. Nobody has ever done experiments to show how blood-clotting could have developed. Nobody has been able to show how a duplicated gene can develop some new function where it starts to make a new and irreducibly complex pathway.”

SURVIVING THE ACID TEST

There
is
a scientific way, however, to establish through experimental data whether Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity is really an insuperable barrier for Darwinism. I was anxious to see whether Behe’s ideas could survive this formidable challenge from Miller, a biology professor who’s an ardent and outspoken evolutionist.

The “true acid test,” explained Miller, would be to use “the tools of molecular genetics to wipe out an existing multi-part system and then see if evolution can come to the rescue with a system to replace it.”
¹³
If the system can be replaced purely by naturalistic evolutionary processes, then Behe’s theory has been disproved.

After describing Miller’s challenge, I asked Behe: “Do you agree this would be a fair test?”

Without hesitation, he said: “Yes, I agree. That’s a terrific test.”

Then I said: “Miller went on to describe an experiment by scientist Barry Hall of the University of Rochester to show how this apparently was done in the laboratory. Miller concluded: ‘No doubt about it—the evolution of biochemical systems, even complex multi-part ones, is explicable in terms of evolution. Behe is wrong.’ ”
¹⁴

I faced Behe squarely. “Tell me, has Hall proved through his experiment that your theory is incorrect?”

Unflustered, Behe replied: “No, not really. Actually, Hall is very modest about what his experiment shows. He didn’t knock out a complex system and then show how evolution can replace it. Instead, he knocked out one component of a system that has five or six components. And replacing one component in a complex system is a lot easier than building one from scratch.

“For instance, suppose someone told you that natural processes could produce a working television set. You’d say, ‘That’s interesting. Why don’t you show me?’ He would then unplug a thousand television sets. Eventually, a strong wind would come along and blow one plug back into the outlet, and the TV would come on. He would say, ‘See? I told you that natural processes could produce a working TV.’ But that’s not exactly what happened. He wasn’t producing a new complex system; there was a glitch introduced and he showed that on occasion this can be fixed by random processes.

“That’s a little like what went on with Hall’s experiment with the bacterium
E. coli
. There was a complex system with a number of different parts, he knocked out one of them, and after a while he showed that random processes came up with a fix for that one part. That’s a far cry from producing a brand new system from scratch.

“But there’s something equally important: Hall made it clear that he had intervened to keep the system going while evolution was trying to come up with a replacement for the missing part. In other words, he added a chemical to the mixture that gave it the time to come up with the mutation that fixed the glitch. The result never would have actually happened in nature without his intelligent intervention in the experiment.

“Here’s another analogy. Suppose you say you can make a three-legged stool by random processes. You take a three-legged stool and break off one leg. Then you hold up the stool so it won’t fall over. Finally, a wind comes along, knocks down a tree branch, and it accidentally falls right where the missing leg had been. You’re intervening to help the stool through the stage where it would otherwise have fallen over and you’ve made it possible for the branch to fit in the right place.

“Back to Hall’s experiment. Without going into the technical details, which I’ve done in more formal responses,
¹⁵
in nature you couldn’t have gotten just the mutation that he got in the laboratory. You would have had to have simultaneously gotten a
second
mutation—and the odds of that would have been prohibitive. Hall made it clear that he intervened so that he would get results that would never have actually happened in the natural world. And that is injecting intelligence into the system.

“When you analyze the entire experiment, the result is exactly what you would expect of irreducible complexity requiring intelligent intervention. Unintentionally, he has shown the limits of Darwinism and the need for design.”

WHIRLPOOLS AND TORNADOES

“What about other alternatives to Darwinian gradualism?” I asked. “How about self-organization? Maybe there’s some sort of self-organizational property in biochemistry that encourages the parts of molecular machines to self-assemble.”

“Just like natural selection explains some things, self organization explains some things too. The controversy arises when they’re used to explain big things or everything,” Behe said.

“It’s true that if you pull out the plug in your bathtub, the water forms a little whirlpool. That’s self-organization: the water is moving in an organized fashion whereas it wasn’t before. Tornadoes organize themselves. If you mix chemicals together in a certain way, you get a system that acts like a clock. It will turn blue, five seconds later it will turn colorless, and it will oscillate back and forth. So it’s clear that there is such a thing as self-organization.

“The question is, can it explain more complicated phenomena? Can it explain the genetic code? Scientists trying to solve the riddle of the origin of life have been exploring self-organizational properties for decades. Yet today they’re more confused about the origin of life than fifty years ago. They haven’t come up with any explanation for how self-organization could account for something as complex as even the first primitive living organism.

“Right now, there’s only one principle that we know can come up with complex interactive systems, and that’s intelligence. Natural selection has been proposed, but there’s little or no evidence backing that claim. Some people had high hopes for self-organizational properties or complexity theory, but there’s no evidence that these can explain something as complicated as the cell. The only force known to be able to make irreducibly complex machines is intelligent design.

“So scientists are in the curious position of ignoring something they know to be capable of explaining what they see in biology, in favor of phantom or totally unproven explanations. Why ignore intelligent design when it’s a good match to the data? Yes, we have to keep an open mind in science, but we shouldn’t be ignoring the most obvious explanation for all the evidence we have today.”

“One reason some scientists are reluctant,” I said, “is because they claim intelligent design is not falsifiable.” I was referring to the belief among many philosophers and scientists that a theory cannot truly be scientific unless there are potential ways to prove it false through experiments or other means.
¹⁶

“That’s silly,” Behe replied.

“But I hear it over and over,” I insisted. “The National Academy of Sciences said: ‘Intelligent design . . . [is] not science because [it’s] not testable by the methods of science.’ ”
¹⁷

“Yes, I know,” he said, “but what’s really ironic is that intelligent design is routinely called unfalsifiable by the very people who are busy trying to falsify it! As you just pointed out, Miller proposed a test that would falsify the claim that intelligence is needed to produce an irreducibly complex system. So I don’t see the problem. Intelligent design’s strong point is that it’s falsifiable, just like a good scientific theory should be. Frankly, I’d say it’s more falsifiable than Darwinism is.”

“Come on,” I said. “Do you really believe that?”

“Yes, I do, and I’ll give you an example,” he replied. “My claim is that there is no unintelligent process that could produce the bacterial flagellum. To falsify that claim, all you would have to do would be to find one unintelligent process that could produce that system. On the other hand, Darwinists claim that
some
unintelligent process could produce the flagellum. To falsify that, you’d have to show that the system could not possibly have been created by any of a potentially infinite number of possible unintelligent processes. That’s impossible to do. So which claim is falsifiable? I’d say the claim for intelligent design.”

That isn’t the only objection that Behe has turned on its head. While Darwinists often accuse intelligent design proponents of letting their religious beliefs color their science, Behe once told a newspaper reporter: “It has been my experience . . . that the ones who oppose the theory of design most vociferously do so for religious reasons.”
¹⁸

“What did you mean by that?” I asked.

“It seems that the folks who get the most animated when talking about Darwinian evolution are the ones most concerned with the philosophical and theological ramifications of the theory, not the science itself,” he explained.

“Scientists propose hypotheses all the time. No big deal. But if I say, ‘I don’t think natural selection is the driving force for the development of life; I think it was intelligent design,’ people don’t just disagree; many of them jump up and down and get red in the face. When you talk to them about it, invariably they’re not excited because they disagree with the science; it’s because they see the extra-scientific implications of intelligent design and they don’t like where it’s leading.”

Behe shrugged. “I guess that’s okay,” he added. “These are important issues and people can get emotional about them. But we should not use what we want to be true to dismiss arguments or try to avoid them.”