22 Facts About Michael Behe

Michael Joseph Behe is an American biochemist and an advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1997, Russell Doolittle, on whose work Michael 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 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.

In 2004, Michael 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.

Michael Behe has subsequently disputed Miller's points in an online essay.

In 2007, Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution was published arguing that while evolution can produce changes within species, there is a limit to the ability of evolution to generate diversity, and this limit is somewhere between species and orders.

The book was reviewed, by prominent scientists in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Globe and Mail, Science, and Nature who were highly critical of the work noting that Michael Behe appears to accept almost all of evolutionary theory, barring random mutation, which is replaced with guided mutation at the hand of an unnamed designer.

Michael Behe promotes intelligent design in his 2019 book, Darwin Devolves whose central premise is that the combination of random mutation and natural selection, apart from being incapable of generating novelty, is mainly a degradative force.

Lang and Rice's assessment noted that while Michael Behe rightfully acknowledges that organisms have common ancestry, it is posited that a designer is required for more distant relationships like at the family level, and that the presentation of degradative processes is exaggerated with evidence of beneficial adaptations dodged.

Michael Behe has written for the Boston Review, The American Spectator, and The New York Times.

In Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, the first direct challenge brought in United States federal courts to an attempt to mandate the teaching of intelligent design on First Amendment grounds, Behe was called as a primary witness for the defense and asked to support the idea that intelligent design was legitimate science.

Michael Behe was forced to concede that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred" and that his definition of 'theory' as applied to intelligent design was so loose that astrology would qualify.

Many of Michael Behe's critics have pointed to these exchanges as examples they believe further undermine Michael Behe's statements about irreducible complexity and intelligent design.

However, Professor Michael Behe 'did not consider how much detail or depth' the texts gave to this standard content.

Michael Behe is married to Celeste Behe and they have nine children who are homeschooled.