How New DNA Science Is Challenging Evolution

This transcript has been edited slightly for continuity.

Segment 1: 

ANNOUNCER:  In the midst of all of today’s noise and confusion, we need a voice that cuts through the chaos to bring wisdom and clarity. Welcome to The Roys Report with Julie Roys—an hour-long show exploring critical issues related to faith and culture from a uniquely Christian perspective. Now, here’s your host, Julie Roys.

JULIE ROYS:  Does evolution really explain the wide diversity of life that we see today or does it merely explain minor adaptations within species? And is it a theory in crisis? Welcome to The Roys Report brought to you in part by Judson University. I’m Julie Roys. And today I’m extremely excited to be interviewing Dr. Michael Behe, a top critic of Darwinian evolution, and a top proponent of Intelligent Design. And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Intelligent Design, it’s the theory that life could not reasonably have arisen by chance, but instead was designed and created by an unseen intelligent agent. After all, when you look at DNA, for example, does it really make sense that such incredible complexity came into being by purposeless non-intelligent processes? Well, there are other problems with evolution besides the complexity, which my guest today has brilliantly exposed over the past couple decades. One is something called “irreducible complexity.” This is the idea that some complex living systems, like we see today, could not possibly have evolved one piece at a time as evolutionists assert. That’s because every single piece of these systems is necessary for the system to work at all. So in a simpler form, the symptoms would be completely dysfunctional, and the belief that a dysfunctional system could somehow gradually evolve into a functional one simply doesn’t make sense. Another huge problem with evolution, that Dr. Behe has exposed, is the discovery that evolution breaks things. It doesn’t make things. Most mutations, for example, are destructive. They may help an organism to survive in a hostile environment, but long-term mutations are unhelpful. So, it simply doesn’t make sense that this largely destructive mechanism of mutations could account for a gradual, constructive evolution of biological life. Well, Dr. Behe first forwarded the second idea of evolution breaking things in his groundbreaking book, The Edge of Evolution. And just this year, he published a follow up to that book called Darwin Devolves—The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution. And I’m very eager to dive into some of this new science with Dr. Behe. So Dr. Behe, welcome. It’s a pleasure to have you join me.

DR. MICHAEL BEHE:  Thanks very much. It’s great to be on the program. Looking forward to the conversation.

JULIE ROYS:  Now, me too. And I gave a short description. I hope I got my descriptions right. I know I sometimes I say these things and my husband who is much more scientific than I am usually corrects me, but I did go over some of this.

DR. MICHAEL BEHE:  You can correct him on his history and politics and so on. 

JULIE ROYS:  Well, I’m not sure he’s pretty good on that, too. But let’s get into some of these ideas. I’d love for you to elaborate. I gave a short description of how evolution breaks things. But could you elaborate on that concept, perhaps drawing on some of this new science that you include in your book?

DR .MICHAEL BEHE:  Yeah, let’s see. Well, here’s an example of an improvement, say from our big everyday world, instead of molecular world of biochemistry. Suppose there were a city and it was inhabited and there was an army that wanted to invade it. But they were across a river and there was only one bridge to the city. What could the city inhabitants do to save themselves? Well, of course, one thing to do is to blow up the bridge. Because if they blew up the bridge, then the invading army couldn’t get over, of course. Then the bridge isn’t there anymore and maybe they used it on occasion. But it’s better to blow up the bridge than to die. And it turns out that that example is exactly what happens in some cases of resistance—human resistance to malaria. In malaria, everybody knows is this deadly disease—can kill a million people a year. And it’s caused by this little bug, a single celled organism, the malaria parasite. And when it gets into human bloodstream, it goes to red blood cells and attaches to them, through a particular protein, and uses that protein as a bridge to kind of penetrate into the cell. Then there are some population of people, in Western Africa, who are immune to the most severe form of malaria. Because their genes—they have broken the gene that makes that protein that serves as the docking site for the malaria parasite. They literally blew up the bridge that the invading army uses to get in. So here we have a loss of a gene. Breaking a gene is helpful to these people. And it’s helpful and it’s Darwinian evolution in action. But that and processes like it don’t explain where sophisticated molecular machinery came from in the first place.

JULIE ROYS:  And doesn’t that mutation in populations—that leads to sickle cell anemia, right? So it’s actually . . .

DR. MICHAEL BEHE:  Yeah, that’s right. That’s actually a different mutation. Turns out there’s a handful of human mutations that help against malaria. But the most famous one is the sickle cell mutation. And that, as you say, it can lead to sickle cell disease, if a person gets two copies of the mutant gene—one from their mom and one from their dad. But if they just have one of them, and one copy of a normal gene from one of their parents, then they only have sickle cell trait. And they’re okay. And they have a measure of resistance to malaria. But at the cost of one quarter of their children likely inheriting two copies of the sickle mutation and dying. So, it’s not very much of a solution to that problem.

JULIE ROYS:  So, inside an environment, like in Africa, where Malaria is prevalent, having sickle cell might be an advantage because it would make you more resistant. But if you come outside of an environment where there’s malaria, it’s actually a weakness. It’s something, again to your point, something that breaks things, so to speak, but doesn’t help us evolve upward. Correct?

DR. MICHAEL BEHE:  That’s exactly right. Yeah random mutation, which just kind of breaks things randomly, as its name implies. And the surprising thing is sometimes that helps. And it turns out that it’s easy to break things. And because it’s easy, that means it’s usually fast. A solution to some problem, like malaria, will come up as a result of breaking a gene much faster than it would making some constructive change to a gene. And because it comes up faster, it has the first opportunity to kind of spread in the population. The kids of the people with the broken gene, if it helps, well, they’ll have more children and their children will have more children. And over time, you actually wouldn’t need any more constructive or complex solution because everybody already has the broken gene that helps them adapt.

JULIE ROYS:  And just for folks who might be, like me, where we’ve been out of school a long time—where we learned about natural selection and how it worked and the mechanism. This is primarily the way that Darwinian evolutionists will say that things evolve, right? It is using this mechanism that you’re saying really doesn’t make sense because it’s not moving things forward.

DR. MICHAEL BEHE:  Yeah, that’s right. Well, and people have to understand that back when Darwin proposed his idea, back in 1859, when he published on The Origin of Species, nobody knew what the cell really was. They could see it in kind of their crude microscopes and it looked like a little blob of jelly. They called it protoplasm. And, you know, what’s the big deal about protoplasm? You know, you can—a bit of jelly looks so simple, it could maybe just bubble up from the sea floor or something. And so, they didn’t think the origin of life was very hard and, of course, they could imagine pieces of jelly kind of shaping themselves and into various things. So he had Darwin and his contemporaries worked under this problem that they didn’t know anything. They didn’t know what DNA was. They didn’t know if molecules were real or not. And so, they were laboring under, you know, a cloud of ignorance. But modern science has discovered the basis of life. And turns out that the cell, we now know, is the basis of life. All organisms are made up of cells and the cell itself is actually run by machines.

JULIE ROYS:  Well, let’s pause there. And when we talk about machines, and how complex they are, we’ll pick that up on the other side of the break. And I know you have a lot to say about that. Again, with me today, Dr. Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box—The Edge of Evolution and his latest, Darwin Devolves. We’ll be right back.

Segment 2:

ANNOUNCER:  We now return to The Roys Report. Here’s your host, Julie Roys.

JULIE ROYS: Evolution is thought to be proven fact, right? Well, not quite. New discoveries are actually undermining the entire theory and may lead to its eventual demise. Welcome back to The Roys Report. I’m Julie Roys. And my guest today is Dr. Michael Behe, the so-called father of intelligent design, and a leading critic of evolution. Dr. Behe’s groundbreaking books have blown sizable holes in the foundation of Darwinist evolution. His new book, Darwin Devolves, does the same, showing how evolution is incapable of building complex structures. In fact, evolution actually degrades these structures. And if you’d like to enter to win a copy of Darwin Devolves you can do that by going to JulieRoys.com/giveaway. But you need to do that by noon on Monday because that’s when the giveaway ends. Also, if you’d like to join our conversation today, I encourage you to do that on social media. To get to us on Facebook, just go to Facebook.com/ReachJulieRoys. And on Twitter our handle is @ReachJulieRoys. Well, Mike, before the break, you were describing how initially, when Darwin proposed his theory, he had a very different view of life than we have today. We used to talk about simple life forms. It seems like now, there aren’t really a lot of simple life forms, right? I mean, they’re incredibly complex.

DR MICHAEL BEHE: That’s right. There’s no such thing as a simple life. Rather the smallest bacterium is intricate beyond imagination. And as I was saying on the other side of the break, that modern science has found that rather than being a little piece of jelly, the cell is actually kind of like a miniature factory or a miniature automated city filled with all sorts of stupendous machinery. And we are having fits about how to make a self-driving car. But the cell actually has little mechanical trucks and buses. They ferry supplies and passengers from one side of the cell to the other, to different compartments of the cell. And there are little molecular signposts that tell the trucks and buses where to turn or where to get off. And little machines that open the doors of the trucks and let the supplies go into the correct compartments. And if any of those things go wrong, if the signals aren’t correct, and the supplies get sent to the wrong compartment, well, you’re in a heap of trouble. And there’s a number of genetic diseases which result from things like that. So, yeah, the basic thing is that with life, its complexity all the way down. Back in Darwin’s day, he could hope that things got simpler as people would discover more and more about life. But it turns out that just like on taking off the cover of a computer, as you probe deeper and deeper, things get more complex, not simpler.

JULIE ROYS: And so this idea of Darwinism that a life form might, to get to this complex system, it might slowly gradually over time, add one piece, and then another piece and then another piece, and eventually you end up with this very elegant, complex system, you posit with your idea of irreducible complexity, that it can’t really work that way, right? Because it’s broken. It doesn’t work at all, if any one of the pieces is missing, correct?

DR MICHAEL BEHE: Yeah, that’s right. And my favorite example to illustrate this idea of irreducible complexity is a mechanical mouse trap. I talked about that in my first book, Darwin’s Black Box. You just think about your plain old mechanical mousetrap that you might get at a hardware store. It’s got a number of pieces. It’s got a wooden platform, usually and a spring and a metal part that the spring pushes on to squash the mouse and another—something called a holding bar—to keep the piece open and stabilized until the mouse comes along. And it turns out [the mousetrap] needs all those pieces to work. If you’re missing the spring, or if you’re missing the holding bar or any of any of the pieces of the mousetrap, it simply doesn’t work. It’s not like it’s going to work half as well as it used to it. It’s broken. So, if you wanted to evolve something like a mouse trap by something like a step by step, slow, gradual Darwinian process, how would you do that? It would be very difficult because the function of the mousetrap—being able to trap mice—only appears when the whole thing has been put together. Natural Selection has nothing to select on its way because the trap isn’t working. And Natural Selection needs to select improvements or function as it’s going along. So that’s a big problem. And it turns out that this machinery in the cell that I talked about, if you think about it, a mousetrap is a very simple machine. And most machinery is more complicated. And turns out that machinery in the cell is very sophisticated. And if you can’t even get a mousetrap by this slow Darwinian process, you’re not going to get the machinery of the cell.

JULIE ROYS: Hmm. Let’s go back to this idea that that Darwinism or evolution devolves. That it breaks things. It doesn’t make things and some of the new science that’s been developed. You have a fascinating example of this about polar bears. Talk about that.

DR MICHAEL BEHE: Yeah, well, it turns out that this problem for Darwin has only become available or become known in the past 10 or 20 years. Because that’s when science has acquired the ability to sequence DNA at the molecular level in sufficient detail in order to see what beneficial mutations are doing—what they are. In the past people could see that this organism, “Well hey, it’s lighter in color and it survives in a snowy environment and Hey, isn’t evolution wonderful that it can do this!” But they didn’t know what the gene was that was being changed. You have to remember that mutations, which are the kind of fodder for Darwinian evolution, are changes in molecules, or changes in DNA. And if you can’t see what the DNA is doing or what changes there are, then you really don’t know how Darwinian evolution is working. But turns out that most people know that the human genome was sequenced about 20 years or so ago—around 2000. And since then, the ability to sequence—it’s been like improvements in Computers—it’s gotten cheaper and faster and really much, much better in the intervening time. And it turns out that the entire genome of the polar bear has been sequenced. And also, the genome of the brown bear, the grizzly bear—and the polar bear is thought to be descended from the brown bear—so scientists were interested in comparing the two genomes—that is, the list of all of the genes of the two bears—and seeing what the differences were. And it turns out that of the 17 most favorable—most beneficial—changes in the brown bear’s DNA to make it into a polar bear, about three quarters of them were damaging or broke genes that were already there in the brown bear. So, you break one gene that helps to make the brown pigment of the brown bear’s coat, and you get white fur in the polar bear. And polar bears eat a lot of fat in the blubber of seals compared to grizzly bears, which eat berries and small animals and so on. And it turns out that breaking a gene involved in fat metabolism allows the polar bear to tolerate much higher levels of cholesterol in its blood than the grizzly bear could. And so, it turns out that the polar bear has not evolved from the brown bear. It has devolved from the brown bear and it has thrown away things that were already there. And that helped it. And you have to realize that . . .

JULIE ROYS: It helped it in the cold environment, in the North Pole, for example, but not if it were back in the brown bear’s environment, in the forest.

DR MICHAEL BEHE: Right, exactly right.

JULIE ROYS: We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll discuss this more again, I’m speaking with Dr. Michael Behe. Author of Darwin Devolves. And when we come back, I’ll talk about two things you might not think are comparable. Economics and evolution. It’s fascinating. Stay tuned.

Segment 3:

ANNOUNCER: More of The Roys Report. Once again, here’s Julie Roys.

JULIE ROYS: Well, does evolution really explain the diversity of life that we see today? Or do recent discoveries show that Darwinism actually works by a process of devolution—damaging cells to create something new at the lowest biological levels? Welcome back to The Roys Report, brought to you in part by Judson University. I’m Julie Roys. And today I’m having an eye-opening discussion with Dr. Michael Behe, the author of numerous groundbreaking books critiquing evolution. These include Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and his latest, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution. And by the way, I’m giving away five copies of Darwin devolves today, so if you’d like to enter to win Darwin Devolves, just go to JulieRoys.com/giveaway. Also, if you’re just joining us and want to listen to the first part of our discussion, you can do that and find that at JulieRoys.com as well. I’ll be posting the complete audio as a podcast. So again, just go to JulieRoys.com, and then click on the podcast tab. So, Michael, we were talking about polar bears as an example of something that devolves. In this process of devolution, that Darwinism or evolution breaks things, it doesn’t make things. There’s also some claims I think, that evolutionists make. And it’s interesting to me that when you come out with these incredibly powerful arguments and these incredibly powerful books, that we don’t see a lot of evolutionary biologists converting to intelligent design. There seems to be just an ideological adherence to evolution and an unwillingness to see it. But also, it seems like the explanatory power that they’re ascribing to evolution sometimes is a little bit larger or a little bit greater than it warrants. And you start out your book—I thought this a fascinating—comparing evolution and the economy or economics and physics. Talk about that.

DR MICHAEL BEHE: Well, yeah. Most people have heard some scientist or magazine article confidently state that scientists know that Darwinian evolution is responsible for all of the intricate life forms that we see around us. But if you think about it for a little while, you realize that’s grossly overstated. They can’t. It’s impossible to know that for sure. Because most people, when they think of science or technology, they think about you know, things like Physics where you can send a rocket to the Moon or a rocket to Mars and do really great feats of engineering. But a lot of sciences are less like Physics and more like long term weather forecasting. Weather forecasters base all their results on physics, too, but it turns out that simply because they’re dealing with a more complex system, things that are hard to measure, then they can’t really accurately forecast the weather much beyond a few days. And they’re lucky oftentimes when they get that. It’s simply that the weather depends kind of sensitively on a large number of variables. And you just can’t calculate accurately what systems like that are going to do very far from the place that you start. This has a name. It’s called chaos theory. And it’s been known for a long time that the sensitive systems can’t be calculated. And it turns out that evolution, of course, would involve very, very many variables that are very difficult to measure. And even in theory, nobody can be sure what caused organisms to change in the distant past. So, when you hear things like that, you’re just kind of being subject to some bluster. People are just making claims that they can’t back up. And if you think about it further, and think about the idea of economics. There are professional economists who like professional evolutionary biologists use a lot of computer models in their work and they try to judge what the conditions are right now and how things will change and so on. And economists are not famous for getting their forecasts accurate. So, biologists have the same problem. But the problem for biologists is even worse, because economists don’t try to explain the goods whose trading, they study: Crude oil or TV sets or cars or coffee beans. They try to forecast the markets for them and now we’ll sell and stuff, but they don’t know where coffee beans came from. They didn’t invent television sets and so on. But, biologists, if you think about it, evolutionary biologists are not only claiming that they can explain what gave rise to want, but how all of these complex biochemical machinery and systems, how that developed step by step. So they have kind of an impossible squared task in front of them. Their task is much more difficult than the task of an economist to forecast the economy of a country 50 years or 100 years out. So, the, the point of introducing my book, Darwin Devolves, with that example was to show readers that, in fact, the claims for Darwinian evolution, our knowledge of that has been grossly exaggerated. And the only reason why scientists say things like that is because they can’t think of any other way that they’re allowed to entertain how such complex organisms, as we have seen, might have gotten into nature. So, it’s kind of bluster upon bluster. And so I try to shake people up at the beginning of the book so that they are able to kind of think a-fresh and see what the problems in particular are for Darwinian evolution and why I think that the better, much better explanation is purposeful design.

JULIE ROYS: Yeah. And yet, again, despite these incredible arguments that you’re making, and showing really what the limits of evolutionary theory are, despite that, you’re not saying a bunch of evolutionary biologists convert because I think there is just a predisposition that we cannot entertain. It must be explained by science because if it’s not explainable by science, well then what do we have left? We have to accept a Creator God. And I think that is the one thing that so many people are just not willing to entertain. Again, I’m speaking with Dr. Michael Behe. We will be right back after a break. And when we come back, I’m going to do some pushback with Dr. Behe with what some critics are saying about his book and allow him to respond. We’ll be right back.

Segment 4:

ANNOUNCER: This is The Roys Report with Julie Roys.

JULIE ROYS: Well, is evolution the best explanation for the diversity of life that we see today? Or is life so complex that it had to be created by some form of intelligence? Welcome back to The Roys Report. I’m Julie Roys. And joining me today is Dr. Michael Behe. He a leading proponent of intelligent design and the author of numerous groundbreaking books critiquing evolution. These include Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and his latest, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution. And Dr. Behe, I said this before the break, but I want to get to some criticisms of intelligent design and we’ll probably get to some specifically of your book Darwin Devolves. There’s never a lack of that is there?

DR MICHAEL BEHE: Yeah, it’s happened before.

JULIE ROYS: Yeah, I’m sure. You just get inundated with people because you’re challenging what is called a scientific theory but in many cases is a religious belief because it’s held by people who must believe it because the alternatives are just not acceptable to them. And actually, I had a debate recently with someone I believe who was in that camp. It was with an atheist. His name is Tom Jump. And during this debate, I made an argument for intelligent design and it’s actually based on the movie contact. Have you seen the movie contact Michael?

DR MICHAEL BEHE: I haven’t, but I’ve read about it. Yeah, you know important parts.

JULIE ROYS: Well, you should see it. It’s my one of my husband’s favorite movies because it shows intelligent design. Because if you’ve seen the movie, it’s about this scientist played by Jodie Foster. And she’s part of the SETI program, which is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. And SETI has these huge satellite dishes that are aimed at space just waiting to capture some intelligence out there who might be communicating with us. So, in this movie, Jodie Foster and these other scientists are listening to outer space hoping to receive some signal some sign of intelligence out there. And all of a sudden, they start receiving these sounds. And at first, they’re thinking, “these are just random sounds, they don’t seem to make much sense.” But then they realize that the sounds are coming in what appears to be prime numbers. And sure enough, they’re prime numbers every single time. And the scientists deduce, “oh my goodness, that can’t be by accident. That has to be some intelligence out there who’s communicating with us.” And then eventually, they actually get blueprints to build a spaceship. Now, this sounds very fanciful, but I’m getting to the point. The point is, they look at that and they say, and anybody who’s watching that movie, it’s not like you’re going, “Oh, that you know what, that’s just random, whatever coming from out of space.” Immediately, you recognize that if we got prime numbers from outer space, if we got blueprints to build a spaceship, of course, that’s intelligence out there. And so, the point I made to this atheist Tom Jump was if we train those satellites, so to speak, on the cells of our own body, and look at DNA, which is incredibly complex, probably more complex than that spaceship, how can we look at that and say that happened, just by purposeless processes? And yet admit that if a spaceship blueprints came to us that that must show intelligence. I’m going to play just a short clip of his response. And then Dr. Behe, I’d love for you to respond.

TOM JUMP: I definitely understand what you’re saying from but from my perspective, when I look at the science, like we can see RNA, the building blocks of DNA being made on clay. We’ve done the experiments to show that this can happen, how it can form spontaneously on just natural processes. I don’t think it’s hard to say that was unlikely. And it seems since we know of a natural process that can occur that can do it, it seems more likely to believe that it did happen just by natural processes than by a being beyond our knowledge that it created it.

JULIE ROYS: Okay, so Michael, help me out. I might be debating this guy again. So, help me out. How do I respond to that?

DR MICHAEL BEHE: Well, you should tell him that he’s looked at the science. But tell him to look at the science a little more closely. Because it turns out that it’s not getting the pieces of RNA to come together, called nucleotides, but rather, it’s the order in which they come together. Think of those blueprints. Suppose we write them out as instructions. Like take this piece and then add it to that. What Mr. Jump was saying is that well, if I had some Scrabble letters, and I put them on clay, they the clay could, you know make this Scrabble letters stick to each other. Well, that’s great. But that doesn’t explain, say, where the instructions came from. The instructions are the precise ordering of those letters in order to get a message to get information out. You can pull Scrabble letters out of a bag and string together a bunch of letters, but you’re never going to get instructions to build a spaceship. What’s more, the experiment that he is referring to is kind of grossly exaggerated. It’s kind of like saying, “Well, you know, in order to make those letters in the instructions, we need some ink. Well, I found a deposit of carbon over here in the ground and here’s a little bit of liquid. And maybe if some meteor hit it, it would splash and make something resembling, say an S. And oh, okay, there’s a letter. Maybe I can use that as part of the instructions.” But the amount of “Ss” and the amount of letters you’re going to get is very small. They’re scattered. And to make a long story short, nobody thinks—no professional person involved in the origin of life research—thins that the problem is anywhere near solved. And another difficulty is that some experiments that professionals know to be either very simple or very limited in what they show are used by people arguing for evolution to trot them out and kind of bluff their way through an argument. They say, “well, RNA and clay and this lines up and so on.” And they hope to reduce the skeptical people to silence. But professionals know those to be incorrect or extremely inadequate. So, you were correct. And you know, he was bluffing. But the problem with this is that one really has to know some of the scientific details to see where the bluff is being posed.

JULIE ROYS: Well, and that’s what I appreciate about your writing and your books is it equips us to have these conversations. But I think at the same time, I don’t think we have to feel like we have all the answers because I think we can come back and say, “you know, that’s a really good question. I’ve never heard that before. Let me go check that out and come back to you.” Not that great in a debate format, necessarily, that’s being recorded. But, I mean, do you find that that sometimes we’re paralyzed to even go there with people because we won’t have the answers?

DR MICHAEL BEHE: Oh, yeah, many, many people are. It’s kind of, you know, fear of science. And, “On no, I’m gonna look dumb.” And, “boy, this person, he’s talking about things I never heard about, so he must know what he’s talking about.” But as I try to show in my books, I go through the very best research that has been put out for many aspects of evolution. And show that it’s utterly inadequate to explain even the simplest. Well, you know all but the simplest types of evolutionary change. So, I hopefully if people want to discuss it knowledgeably and publicly, I’d urge them to do a bit of homework first. And once you do you can be very effective that kind of exposing the, the lack of knowledge and bluster that that you routinely encounter.

JULIE ROYS: Well, let me I also want to just mention a critique that came from I guess this was in Science Magazine, article entitled, “A biochemist crusade to overturn evolution misrepresents theory and ignores evidence.” They’re talking about you. So, I’m going to give you a chance to respond to this. But he writes, there’s actually three authors who write, “he doubles down on his claim that the evolution of chloroquine resistance and malaria by random mutations is exceedingly unlikely because at least two mutations are required, neither of which is beneficial without the other.” Again, if you’re hearing that for the first time, we talked about this in the first segment about how Malaria is one of those examples of evolution devolving. In other words, it breaks things it doesn’t really help an organism per se. He writes, “Behe’s calculations have already been refuted. And it has long been known that neutral and even deleterious mutations can provide steppingstones to future adaptations. Indeed, a 2014 study, unmentioned by Behe, reported discovery of genetic pass through which malaria has evolved Chloroquine resistance through multiple steps.” Tell me about that, that study and does it doesn’t refute?

DR MICHAEL BEHE: Well, short answer is no. And the slightly longer is that it takes a number of details to adequately do it justice. But the good point is that I’ve written tons about exactly that. And it’s posted at the website of the Discovery Institute. So, listeners should go there if they want to know all the details and look up my responses. And the short answer is that I know all of the things that the reviewers talked about, on Chloroquine and resistance. I consider them in my book, it was the major example of the Edge of Evolution. And I showed explicitly that none of what they say affects my calculations and conclusions at all. And the most interesting part, I think, for listeners to know is that the reviewers–this is the review of my latest book, Darwin Devolves in Science Magazine, which was one of the two most prominent science journals professional science journals in the world. Apparently, those reviewers didn’t even read my responses to those two earlier criticisms and they just kinda like the, the fellow, Mr. Jump, who you debated may just throw these things out and rely on people who support Darwinian evolution to just kind of smile and say, somebody who’s taken care of those, you know, annoying ID people. And they don’t actually deal with the arguments. They just throw things up. And I have to admit I have read, you know, read that review closely as you might imagine, and it’s a terrible review. It doesn’t deal with the argument of the current book. It brings up old, old objections that I’ve dealt with decades ago to earlier arguments, for example, about irreducible complexity and many other things

JULIE ROYS: Oh well, Dr. Behe here again. That’s Dr. Michael Behe. I so appreciate what you have and what you bring to the table. I appreciate your arguments today again, his book is Darwin devolves, you can get that now in bookstores everywhere. But this discussion reminds me of Romans 1:20. It says, “For since the creation world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse.” The world is full of the complexity, the beauty, the order that our God has put there, and so I think it does, it is reasonable to believe in him. Thanks, so much for joining me again. You’ve been listening to the Roys Report. I’m Julie Roys. Hope you have a great weekend and God bless