Michael Behe

Background

Michael Behe (b. 1952) is an American biochemist at Lehigh University and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, best known as the author of Darwin's Black Box (1996) and the architect of the concept of irreducible complexity — the flagship biological argument of the contemporary Intelligent-Design movement. Behe accepts common descent and an old Earth but denies that unguided natural selection can account for certain molecular machines, which he takes to be positive markers of design.

His primary works are copyright-locked and absent from this public-domain corpus; his position is reconstructed here from the Stanford Encyclopedia's secondary treatment. Behe is careful not to name the designer with the Christian God, presenting the inference as science rather than theology — though, as the SEP notes, "the implication is that it is a force from without the normal course of nature."

Positions held in this wiki

• Intelligent Design as a Scientific Program — supplies the movement's first R: "a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning" (SEP 'Creationism' §7, quoting Behe 1996: 39). Stock example: the bacterial flagellum.
• The Origin of Life — irreducible complexity extended to the molecular machinery of the cell as an obstacle to gradualist origin-of-life accounts.
• Methodological Naturalism — Scope and Limits — with William Dembski, proposes design as a detectable scientific category, challenging the constitutive reading of methodological naturalism.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Darwin's Black Box (1996) is not ingested (copyright-locked). Behe's definition and the flagellum example are preserved in SEP 'Creationism' §7 and his structural role is framed in SEP 'Teleological Arguments' §4.2. See meta/ingestion-queue.md.

Principal critics

• Charles Darwin — the scaffolding/co-optation rebuttal: an interdependent structure can arise gradually and only become irreducible afterward, so present indispensability does not show a part "could not have been put in place by natural selection" (SEP 'Creationism' §8).
• Kenneth Miller — argues Behe's cases "fail to establish that there are no plausible small-step evolutionary paths," citing "strong evidence for a Darwinian evolutionary history of the flagellum" (not in corpus; via SEP).

See also

• William Dembski — the complementary "specified complexity" criterion.
• Stephen C. Meyer — extends the design inference to DNA sequence information.