Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 352 pages
• Published by: Free Press
• Edition: 2nd Edition March 7, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0743290313
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0743290319
• Book Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 10.4 ounces

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Paperback) I am not a biologist, but I have a degree in philosophy and am a fairly well read guy. I found this book quite invigorating and accessible to non-scientists such as myself. One of the most striking things I have discovered about the vehement critiques of this book both at the Amazon website as well as other Behe websites is the alarming degree of hatred and resentment that has been displayed by Behe's fellow scientists. Now, whether Behe is right or wrong is beside the point when one just considers how his attackers have chosen to respond to his book; using mere ad hominum tactics does not instill in me a sense of confidence in Behe's adversaries' actually knowing what they are talking about. After all, when one feels compelled to do nothing more than hurl insults at the author of a book instead of actually taking the time to engage the argument of the book, that tells me that the critic has an insecurity complex. And that is precisely what the majority of Behe's peers have done; they have basically said "How DARE he challenge Darwinian natural selection? " As the late Carl Sagan said so vociferously so many times, science is SUPPOSED to be an open forum for discussion. No matter how smart a person is or what his or her credentials are, no one view is supposed to be categorically accepted or categorically rejected without due process. Categorically rejecting Behe's theory of IC and trying to attack him personally tells me just how little so many of these "professional"scientists actually know about science. Now, I would like to answer all of the reviewers who complained that Behe did not present his case to his scientific colleagues but instead wrote a book for the general public & thereby bypassed his colleagues. Well, I have a question for you: how many of you Darwinists have heard of the Wistar Institute? I would imagine very few, unless you read about it in Behe's book. I have read about it elsewhere in other books & have always found it curious that so few people are aware of this discussion from the late 1960s. What Wistar was was a forum that put together many of the world's best biologists together with the world's best mathmaticians. It was designed to prove the mathmatcial validity of Darwinian natural selection. It was, however, a complete distaster. The odds proved so enormous that Darwinism seemed to be mathmatically impossible. Wistar was thereby shoved into the closet & hidden because it was an embarrasment to the Darwinists. Now, I ask the question: was Wistar bad science(like so many evolutionists have called Behe's book?). If so, WHY? One thing is for certain; nobody can accuse the scientists involved in Wistar to be Creationists - they were atheists to a last man, for heaven's sake. It was most definetly not a conspiracy in which the outcome was jury-rigged. Now, for all I know, some reason may preclude mathmatics from being a reliable tool to use in discussions of Darwinian natural selection. But if so, it must be PROVED thus. To date, all I have read of this critique of Darwinism have been strawman arguments that state that: well, just because it is highly improbable does not mean it can't happen by chance. After all, what are the odds of getting a winning hand in a poker game? Arguments like these (most famously instituted by pro-Darwinians such as Doolittle) grossly miss the point. The point is not that it is highly improbable but rather that the odds are so astronomical as to make the plausibility impossible. Now, to give an example: according to the laws of quantum mechanics, if all of the atoms on the moon had exactly the same spin at exactly the same second, the moon COULD leave it's orbit from the earth. This is a probabalistic fact. However, the point is, it WON'T. Even though it is mathmatically possible, it is realistically impossible because the moon has too many atoms to make this feat plausible. The same goes for the odds of Darwinian evolution happening just so in the mere 4 & a half billion years (or so) that the earth has been around. Now, I ask the question, yea hardcore Darwinists: why is it that the Wistar Institute does not warrant even so much as a footnote on any collegiate or high school biology text in the world? After all, if it had shown so much as a shred of evidence that Darwinism was mathmatically acceptable, I GUARANTEE you that it would be in EVERY student's biological textbook and would be as familiar to the layman's vocabulary as Einstein's theory of Relativity. Is this not a double-standard? If the scientists at Wistar were wrong (they could have been) then they must be PROVEN wrong. However, after thirty years, as MIT theoretical physicist Gerald Schoeder has attested, the odds have if anything gone UP. I find it rather fascinating that the same neo-Darwinists who find their paradigm so mathematically credible do not stay up at night with dark thoughts about the moon leaving the orbit of the Earth. So, where am I going with this, you ask? Well, this is my point: if the scientific community is and was unwilling to accept the findings of it's own old-boy-club happy-as-can-be atheists, how in the world do you expect them to pay attention to a molecular biologist who dares to mention the dirty G word? I think that Behe deserves some slack on this one. That is, unless you believe in the double-standards that Sagan so vehemently wanted to jettison from the realm of science.... Comments (22) | | (Report this)