Dave
Ussery (Dave@CBS.dtu.dk), a biochemist in Denmark, May 20, 1999, 
A
Biochemist Responds to Behe's Challenge
Michael
Behe does a wonderful job of describing the intricacies of biochemical
systems. However, as a biochemist I was surprised to see several distortions
throughout the book. Behe writes as though there were some great conspiracy
amongst scientists to hide the truth, and that there's no evidence at all
for evolution of complex biochemical systems. He then concludes this absence
of explanation could mean 'intelligent design'. I think there is in fact
lots of evidence out there, and can gladly recommend any of the books below.
In particular, 'The Origins of Life' is a good place to start. 'Darwin's
Black Box' states in the subtitle that it is meant to be a 'biochemical
challenge to evolution'. For someone who is not a scientist (or even some
scientists who aren't that familiar with modern biochemistry), the arguments
might sound serious. Many of his arguments have been answered by papers
published since his book was written in 1995. For example, his 'irreducibly
complex' flagella which appeared to require at least 40 proteins in 1995,
now has been reduced to 31 proteins, and bacteria with fewer proteins for
their flagella could be found soon as more genomes become sequenced. In
addition, there are many facts which have been known for a long time that
somehow didn't get mentioned - like the observation that DNA bases will
spontaneously stack on their own to form a helix - this is pretty important
if you're going to talk about the evolution of DNA and RNA (see the book
on 'Understanding DNA' below for a good description of this). Behe also
fails to take into account that most biological systems are far from equilibrium,
and then seems surprised when simple equilibrium chemistry can't explain
the origins of complex systems. Yes, non-equilibrium thermodynamics is
more complicated, but not IMPOSSIBLE. Finally, I found very little in terms
of any sense of information theory and evolution, which seems logical to
include in his arguments about the evolution of complex systems. In short
I am unconvinced of his scientific arguments, and after reading this book
I felt more like Behe was relying on (his impression of) the ABSENCE of
explanation to advocate his very popular theory of purposeful intelligent
design.
Books
I recommend for further reading about evolution of complex biochemical
systems:
'The
Origins of Life' by J.M.Smith & E.Szathmary
'The
Pattern of Evolution' by N.Elderidge
'Understanding
DNA' by C.Calladine and H.Drew
'Climbing
Mt. Improbable' by R.Dawkins
'The
Logic of Life' by F.Jacob
'Information
and the Origin of Life' by B.Kuppers
Also recommended: The Origins of Life by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary
