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Behe’s New “Mousetrap” Book — The Fragility of Darwinism

Photo credit: Justus Menke, via Unsplash.

Darwinism is “sustained mostly by sociology.” Meaning, career pressures, groupthink, media hypnotism, and the like. So says biochemist Michael Behe, author of the new book A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics, in a webinar conversation with Discovery Institute’s John West. The webinar was held over the past weekend and you can see it now.

The video recording of the event is quite entertaining, covering topics both weighty and whimsical — like Behe’s comparison of life, with its molecular machines, to The Borg from Star Trek. And what is the Lehigh University biochemist’s favorite Star Trek episode, anyway? Dr. Behe and Dr. West discuss the purpose of gathering Behe’s replies to the stronger and the weaker critiques of his earlier books. They take on a diverse range of live questions from viewers around the world. Why this book and why now? The idea of the volume is not merely to dunk on the critics. Behe, to be frank, doesn’t find of any their criticisms very meaningful.

Nor is it just to shoot down what West calls the fake news-like “fake criticism” that Behe ignores challenges, as the reviewers of Behe’s recent book Darwin Devolves insinuated in a prominent article in the journal Science. West was surprised to realize just how voluminous Behe’s record of answering critics actually is. He first thought he could fit the replies in a volume of just 300 pages or so. It turned out that Behe had more than 700 pages available to use. These were culled down in the end to 556 pages.

Instead, A Mousetrap for Darwin demonstrates that “Darwinism is much more fragile” than many people realize, as Behe puts it here. That is the big takeaway. What’s assumed to be an unmovable, unbreakable monument to objective science should at this point, if we were all honest with ourselves, be steps away from shattering.