Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. SIGNED. ISBN: 0684834936 / 0-684-83493-6

In 1996, Darwins Black Box helped to launch the intelligent design movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design, beyond Darwinian randomness. It sparked a national debate on evolution, which continues to intensify across the country. From one end of the spectrum to the other, Darwins Black Box has established itself as the key intelligent design text—the one argument that must be addressed in order to determine whether Darwinian evolution is sufficient to explain life as we know it. In a major new Afterword for this edition, Behe explains that the complexity discovered by microbiologists has dramatically increased since the book was first published. That complexity is a continuing challenge to Darwinism, and evolutionists have had no success at explaining it. Darwins Black Box is more important today than ever. "Virtually all serious scientists accept the truth of Darwin's theory of evolution. While the fight for its acceptance has been a long and difficult one, after a century the battle is over. Biologists are now confident that their remaining questions, such as how life on Earth began, or how the Cambrian explosion could have produced so many new species in such a short time, will be found to have Darwinian answers. They, like most of the rest of us, accept Darwin's theory to be true." "But should we? What would happen if we found something that radically challenged the now-accepted wisdom? As Behe engagingly demonstrates, using the examples of vision, blood-clotting, cellular transport, and more, the biochemical world comprises an arsenal of chemical machines, made up of finely calibrated, interdependent parts. For Darwinian evolution to be true, there must have been a series of mutations, each of which produced its own working machine, that led to the complexity we can now see. The more complex and interdependent each machine's parts are shown to be, the harder it is to envision Darwin's gradualistic paths." "Michael Behe is not a creationist. He believes in the scientific method, and he does not look to religious dogma for answers to these questions. But he argues persuasively that biochemical machines must have been designed - either by God, or by some other higher intelligence. For decades science has been frustrated, trying to reconcile the astonishing discoveries of modern biochemistry to a nineteenth-century theory that cannot accommodate them. With the publication of Darwin's Black Box, it is time for scientists to allow themselves to consider exciting new possibilities, and for the rest of us to watch closely."--BOOK JACKET PREFACE......Page 9 THE BOX IS OPENED......Page 15 LILIPUTIAN BIOLOGY......Page 17 NUTS AND BOLTS......Page 40 EXAMINING THE CONTENTS OF THE BOX......Page 63 ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT......Page 65 RUBE GOLDBERG IN THE BLOOD......Page 88 FROM HERE TO THERE......Page 112 A DANGEROUS WORLD......Page 131 ROAD KILL......Page 154 WHAT DOES THE BOX TELL US?......Page 177 PUBLISH OR PERISH......Page 179 INTELLIGENT DESIGN......Page 201 QUESTIONS ABOUT DESIGN......Page 223 SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION......Page 246 AFTERWORD......Page 269 APPENDIX......Page 287 NOTES......Page 309 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 327 Explores the impact of biochemistry on evolutionary theory, discussing the reasons and citing examples of why evolution must be argued at the molecular level, and studying the implications of biochemistry's discoveries This book is about an idea-Darwinian evolution-that is being pushed to its limits by discoveries in biochemistry. Michael J. Behe. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 277-289) And Index.