The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [104]
That’s when Behe realized that as a biochemist, he was perfectly situated to investigate whether the evidence points toward Darwinism or God as the source for living organisms. After all, life is essentially a molecular phenomenon. If Darwinian evolution is going to work, it has to succeed at the microscopic level of amino acids, proteins, and DNA. On the other hand, if there really was a designer of the world, then his fingerprints were going to be all over the cell.
And the cell is Behe’s world—an incredible, intricate, Lilliputian world where a typical cell takes ten million million atoms to build. One scientist described a single-cell organism as a high-tech factory, complete with
artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction . . . [and] a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. 3
Shaking off his preconceptions as best he could, Behe began to scrutinize the molecular evidence with new eyes. Ultimately, he would summarize his stunning conclusions in what the National Review would call one of the most important non-fiction books of the twentieth century.
INTERVIEW #6: MICHAEL J. BEHE, PHD
Lehigh University’s “Mountaintop Campus,” a seventy-two-acre, eight-building research complex overlooking the hardscrabble city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was littered with brown, brittle leaves when I arrived one autumn afternoon in my search for Michael Behe.
After parking in front of Iacocca Hall, a modern, tan-and-green glass building, I walked up to the second floor. I strolled down a long hallway with laboratories on both sides—the Complex Carbohydrate Research Lab, the Core Chromatography/Electrophoresis Lab, the Molecular Microbiology Research Lab, the Neuroendocrinology Lab, the Core DNA Lab, and the ominous-sounding Virology Lab, with an orange biohazard sign plastered on its door.
The hallway’s wall featured scintillating reading—an oversized reproduction of a technical article by two Lehigh scientists, asking the provocative question: “How Does Testosterone Affect Hippocampal Plasticity in Black-Capped Chickadees?”
I knocked on the door of a nondescript office and was greeted cheerfully by Behe, dressed in blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt. He’s enthusiastic, energetic, and engaging, with a quick smile and a crackling sense of humor. He always seems to be moving; even when perched on his swivel chair, he would roll back and forth ever so slightly. Wiry and balding, with wispy gray hair, a beard, and round glasses, he has a gentle and self-effacing manner that tends to put visitors at ease.
Behe credits his casual manner to being the father of eight (at the time, going on nine) children, who keep him from taking himself too seriously. He laughed when I asked if he had any hobbies. “Mostly, I drive kids places,” he said.
Behe grew up on the other side of Pennsylvania. He received a degree in chemistry with honors from Drexel University and a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. After post-doctorate research at the University of Pennsylvania and the National Institutes of Health, he joined Lehigh’s faculty in 1985. He also has served on the Molecular Biochemistry Review Panel of the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences at the National Science Foundation.
He has authored forty articles for such scientific journals as DNA Sequence, The Journal of Molecular Biology, Nucleic Acids Research, Biopolymers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Biophysics, and