Episode Details

Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist and Intelligent Design proponent, gives us his perspective of ID, and responses to several counterarguments against ID.

To start off our deep-dive into Intelligent Design, we wanted to talk to a knowledgeable representative of that movement. Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist who has been waving that flag for three decades now, and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute (“ID Headquarters”), was a great choice for this first conversation. In addition to exploring a variety of biochemical and physiological concepts, our main goal was to get his response to several counterarguments against Intelligent Design which we hear often (and resonate with).

Our points of discussion included:

• he’s not a Young Earth Creationist … he does accept human evolution from an ancestor we share in common with the apes; as an Intelligent Design proponent, he believes that the evolutionary steps had to have been guided (not random or undirected)
• “irreducible complexity” refers to a system/machine which has multiple parts and requires ALL of those parts to maintain its original function [our response: “sure, but it CAN be changed or reduced to do other functions”]
• his often-used analogy for irreducible complexity is a mouse-trap
• cells are made up of nanomachines which are made out of many parts, all of which are essential or the machine no longer works (“so they’re irreducibly complex”); his often-used example is the bacterial flagellum motor (BFM)
• he argues that this irreducible complexity can not be accounted for by Darwinian mechanisms
• counterargument #1: you can indeed take away certain parts, and what remains can still be quite functional, albeit perhaps not as a flagellum motor (or mousetrap). The BFM can be stripped down to a much smaller number of parts leaving another bacterial machine (the type III secretory system) which has a completely different function (it’s involved in squirting proteins out of the cell, rather than