The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [114]
SURVIVING THE ACID TEST
There is a scientific way, however, to establish through experimental data whether Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity is really an insuperable barrier for Darwinism. I was anxious to see whether Behe’s ideas could survive this formidable challenge from Miller, a biology professor who’s an ardent and outspoken evolutionist.
The “true acid test,” explained Miller, would be to use “the tools of molecular genetics to wipe out an existing multi-part system and then see if evolution can come to the rescue with a system to replace it.” 13 If the system can be replaced purely by naturalistic evolutionary processes, then Behe’s theory has been disproved.
After describing Miller’s challenge, I asked Behe: “Do you agree this would be a fair test?”
Without hesitation, he said: “Yes, I agree. That’s a terrific test.”
Then I said: “Miller went on to describe an experiment by scientist Barry Hall of the University of Rochester to show how this apparently was done in the laboratory. Miller concluded: ‘No doubt about it—the evolution of biochemical systems, even complex multi-part ones, is explicable in terms of evolution. Behe is wrong.’ ” 14
I faced Behe squarely. “Tell me, has Hall proved through his experiment that your theory is incorrect?”
Unflustered, Behe replied: “No, not really. Actually, Hall is very modest about what his experiment shows. He didn’t knock out a complex system and then show how evolution can replace it. Instead, he knocked out one component of a system that has five or six components. And replacing one component in a complex system is a lot easier than building one from scratch.
“For instance, suppose someone told you that natural processes could produce a working television set. You’d say, ‘That’s interesting. Why don’t you show me?’ He would then unplug a thousand television sets. Eventually, a strong wind would come along and blow one plug back into the outlet, and the TV would come on. He would say, ‘See? I told you that natural processes could produce a working TV.’ But that’s not exactly what happened. He wasn’t producing a new complex system; there was a glitch introduced and he showed that on occasion this can be fixed by random processes.
“That’s a little like what went on with Hall’s experiment with the bacterium E. coli. There was a complex system with a number of different parts, he knocked out one of them, and after a while he showed that random processes came up with a fix for that one part. That’s a far cry from producing a brand new system from scratch.
“But there’s something equally important: Hall made it clear that he had intervened to keep the system going while evolution was trying to come up with a replacement for the missing part. In other words, he added a chemical to the mixture that gave it the time to come up with the mutation that fixed the glitch. The result never would have actually happened in nature without his intelligent intervention in the experiment.
“Here’s another analogy. Suppose you say you can make a three-legged stool by random processes. You take a three-legged stool and break off one leg. Then you hold up the stool so it won’t fall over. Finally, a wind comes along, knocks down a tree branch, and it accidentally falls right where the missing leg had been. You’re intervening to help the stool through the stage where it would otherwise have fallen over and you’ve made it possible for the branch to fit in the right place.
“Back to Hall’s experiment. Without going into the technical details, which I’ve done in more formal responses, 15 in nature you couldn’t have gotten just the mutation that he got in the laboratory. You would have had to have simultaneously gotten a second mutation—and the odds of that would have been prohibitive. Hall made it clear that he intervened so that he would get results that would never have actually happened in the