Michael Behe

Michael Joseph Behe (born January 18, 1952) is an American biochemist and an advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design (ID).

He serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

Behe advocates for the validity of the argument for irreducible complexity (IC), which claims that some biochemical structures are too complex to be explained by known evolutionary mechanisms and are therefore probably the result of intelligent design.

Behe has testified in several court cases related to intelligent design, including the court case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District where his views were cited in the ruling that intelligent design is not science and is religious in nature.

Behe's claims about the irreducible complexity of essential cellular structures have been rejected by the vast majority of the scientific community, and his own biology department at Lehigh University published a statement repudiating Behe's views and intelligent design.

Behe was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Bishop McDevitt High School.

He graduated from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1974 with a BS in chemistry.

He received his PhD in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell disease.

From 1978 to 1982, he did postdoctoral work on DNA structure at the National Institutes of Health.

From 1982 to 1985, he was assistant professor of chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he met his wife, Celeste.

In 1985, he moved to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he is currently a professor of biochemistry.

Behe says he once fully accepted the scientific theory of evolution, but that after reading Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), by Michael Denton, he came to question evolution.

Later, Behe came to believe that there was evidence, at a biochemical level, that some biological systems were "irreducibly complex".

He thought that these systems could not, even in principle, have evolved by natural selection.

He believed that the only possible alternative explanation for such complex structures was that they were created by an "intelligent designer".

Irreducible complexity has been rejected by the scientific community.

The 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard U.S. Supreme Court decision barred the required teaching of creation science from public schools but allowed evolutionary theory on the grounds of scientific validity.

After the decision, a later draft of the textbook Of Pandas and People (1989) systematically replaced each and every cognate of the word "creation" with the phrase "intelligent design" or similar ID terms.

The books of lawyer Phillip E. Johnson on theistic realism dealt directly with criticism of evolutionary theory and its purported biased "materialist" science, and aimed to legitimize the teaching of creationism in schools.

In March 1992, a conference at Southern Methodist University brought Behe together with other leading figures into what Johnson later called the "wedge strategy."

In 1993, the "Johnson-Behe cadre of scholars" met at Pajaro Dunes, California, and Behe presented for the first time his idea of irreducibly complex molecular machinery.

For the 1993 edition of Pandas, Behe wrote a chapter on blood clotting, presenting arguments which he later presented in very similar terms in a chapter in his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box.

Behe later agreed that they were essentially the same when he defended intelligent design at the Dover trial.

Following a summer 1995 conference, "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture," the group obtained funding through the Discovery Institute.

In 1996, Behe became a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, later renamed the Center for Science and Culture, an organization dedicated to promoting intelligent design.

In 1996, Behe published his ideas on irreducible complexity in his book Darwin's Black Box.

Behe's refusal to identify the nature of any proposed intelligent designer frustrates scientists, who see it as a move to avoid any possibility of testing the positive claims of ID while allowing him and the intelligent design movement to distance themselves from some of the more overtly religiously motivated critics of evolution.

As to the identity of the intelligent designer, Behe responds that if, deep in the woods, one were to come across a group of flowers that clearly spelled out the name "LEHIGH", one would have no doubt that the pattern was the result of intelligent design.

Determining who the designer was, however, would not be nearly as easy.

In 1997, Russell Doolittle, on whose work Behe based much of the blood-clotting discussion in Darwin's Black Box, wrote a rebuttal to the statements about irreducible complexity of certain systems.

In particular, Doolittle mentioned the issue of the blood clotting in his article, "A Delicate Balance."

In 2001 Pennock responded that he had been careful to represent their views correctly, and that while several leaders of the intelligent design movement were young Earth creationists, others including Behe were "old-earthers" and "creationists in the core sense of the term, namely, that they reject the scientific, evolutionary account of the origin of species and want to replace it with a form of special creation."

Later on, in 2003, Doolittle's lab published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which demonstrates that the pufferfish lacks at least three out of 26 blood clotting factors, yet still has a workable blood clotting system.

According to Doolittle, this defeats a key claim in Behe's book, that blood clotting is irreducibly complex.

In reviewing a book by Robert T. Pennock, Behe took issue with the "intelligent design" group being associated with "creationism," saying readers would typically take that to mean biblical literalism and young Earth creationism (YEC).

In 2004, Behe published a paper with David Snoke, in the scientific journal Protein Science that uses a simple mathematical model to simulate the rate of evolution of proteins by point mutation, which he states supports irreducible complexity, based on the calculation of the probability of mutations required for evolution to succeed.

However, the paper does not mention intelligent design nor irreducible complexity, which were removed, according to Behe, at the behest of the reviewers.

From 2005 to 2024, Lehigh University's department of biological sciences exhibited a position statement on its website stating that its faculty reject Behe's views on evolution:

"The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of 'intelligent design.' While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific."

As of 2024, his faculty webpage states: "My arguments about irreducible complexity and intelligent design are my own, and are not endorsed either by Lehigh University in general or by the Department of Biological Sciences in particular."