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Michael Behe's works, for all their flaws, have always been the gold standard of creationist writing. He avoids citing creationist sources, including the books of his Discovery Institute peers. His forays into the culture war that lies at the true heart of ID Creationism are brief and limited. He has legitimate credentials as a biochemist. His ideas are, for the most part, his own, and he has the rhetorical skills to defend them. But scrutiny of those ideas invariably shows that we are dealing here more with iron pyrite than with gold. This book, in which he seeks to show that mutation and natural selection mostly evolve organisms by "devolving" -- by damage to functioning DNA sequences -- is akin to his prior efforts, and, like them, comes to nothing. How so? Let's look at a few things. In order to make the point that natural evolutionary processes can't generate a lot of diversity (he announces here that the limits of natural biological evolution lie at the family level -- that while evolution may develop genera and species, it can do no more) he points to a couple of interesting real-world examples (Darwin's finches and the cichlids of Lake Victoria) and also to the E. coli work of Richard Lenski (whose critical review of this book, incidentally, can be found in Science, Feb. 8, 2019, p. 590). The problem with this approach, strangely, is right there in plain sight. At page 155 he says: "Well, lengthy as it is, might two million years be insufficient for major evolutionary changes to take place? Demonstrably not. Most of the many, profoundly different animal phyla that arose during the Cambrian explosion did so in only about ten million years; mammals diversified rapidly in roughly the same amount of time after the dinosaurs disappeared;whales arose from a terrestrial ancestor in about the same time. Surely we should expect at least one crummy new phylum, class or order to be conjured by Darwin's vaunted mechanism in the time the finches have been on the Galapagos. But no, nothing. A surprising but compelling conclusion is that Darwin's mechanism has been wildly overrated -- it is incapable of producting much biological change at all." What Behe has done here is pretty strange. He's decided that we can take Darwin's finches as an adaptive radiation that illustrates the most extreme possible results of evolution -- and then points to multiple cases where it did more! On what ground does one use the SLOWEST of the examples to illustrate the FASTEST possible rate of change? Can Behe demonstrate that something other than natural evolutionary processes account for these other events? He cannot, of course. Now, it may be that Behe doesn't understand the differences between the finch, cichlid and E. coli examples he employs and these adaptive radiations. It may be, alternatively, that he does understand but hopes his readers will not. But no biologist is going to follow him, for a few simple reasons. Each of the examples he gives of evolution producing limited results involves a constrained environment with few opportunities for allopatric speciation -- small islands, a single lake, or a monoculture of bacteria in a lab. These are nothing like the rise of the mammals, the Cambrian explosion or the evolution of whales. Where the island finches or the cichlids face a tightly bounded environment, and the E. coli even more so, with limited ecological niches to exploit, the mammals suddenly found themselves on a planet containing every sort of natural environment, where the dominant large fauna had been comprehensively destroyed. No top predators, no large herbivores, nothing in between -- and this led to a vast adaptive radiation with plenty of morphological innovation. The evolution of whales is a narrower phenomenon, but another marvelous example of post-extinction niche exploitation -- mosasaurs had been taken out by the K-Pg extinction along with the dinosaurs. What comparable opportunity did Darwin's finches have? The Cambrian explosion, likewise. First, it didn't happen in ten million years as Behe says. The paper he cites by Doug Erwin for that point says no such thing (and is well worth a read!). As the excellent book on the Cambrian explosion by Doug Erwin and James Valentine shows, this era had it all: complex single-celled eukaryotes, early small multicellular creatures (beginning, well before the Cambrian, with sponges), and increasing oxygen levels in the seas which enabled larger and more complex body sizes. The existence of cellular regulatory functions in single-celled organisms provided an ample source from which development-regulating functions could be derived for early multicellular animals, and as animals increased in size and complexity they opened new ecological opportunities for themselves and for each other -- the first construction of truly complex ecosystems. Apart from stationary filter-feeding or microbial mats, every ecological niche was wide open for new organisms. What on earth does Behe suppose Darwin's finches ought to have done? Evolve into whale-birds or bird-monkeys? What compelling case does Behe make that some immense ecological gap in the Galapagos provided these finches a K-Pg-like opportunity? None at all. He merely hopes his reader will suppose that if vast adaptive radiations ever happen at all, they must therefore always happen in all circumstances. Behe's principal argument -- that evolutionary processes overwhelmingly break things -- has been addressed in reviews by his peers, and found badly wanting. It seems it is based, as usual, on a good deal of selective viewing of the data. If you'd like to know what's actually going on with polar bears, E. coli, et cetera, I'd suggest reviewing the responses of people who are expert in those topics; Lenski has blogged about the book, for example. These matters are more complex than can easily be treated in a book review; anyone who takes Behe at face value is liable to be surprised by the facts. But while some of Behe's biochemical arguments are best addressed by specialists, there are still some rather glaring problems that the layman should easily see: (1) By lumping mutations which "break" regulatory sequences into the same group as those which break genes, Behe inflates the tendency for mutations to result in real "loss of information." Changes to gene regulation are enormously important in evolution, and because such things as binding sites are much simpler than genes, and generally do not require the kinds of complex molecular features which Behe discusses, one must not consider changes in gene regulation, even by disruption of a regulatory feature, to necessarily be "losses" of information. (2) In a chapter titled "Dollo's Timeless Law," he points out -- no surprise -- that it's not easy for a gene which has been mutated and selected away from its ancestral form to de-evolve backward, against the forces of selection, in the exact path to its exact ancestral form. He then equates the low probability of this very specific, anti-selection pathway to the probability of the gene mutating into ANY functional form in the future. That, of course, simply doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. (3) This whole argument is against morphological novelty at the cellular level -- but what Behe doesn't mention is that in multicellular animal evolution, there's really very little of that going on, anyhow. An enormous amount of the variety among mammals, for example, is accounted for by differences in gene expression or small differences in the genes themselves. At the "cellular machine" level with which Behe is principally concerned, there simply isn't much (if, indeed, any) novelty needed to make a squirrel that isn't also needed to make a rhinoceros. That tail, despite appearances, is no flagellum. Where is Behe going with all of this? After showing us what he thinks is NOT happening, what does he say IS happening? Well, he gives us a glimpse of that when discussing lemurs (p. 168): "Thus the groupings may be an artifact of classification or,much more intriguingly, perhaps the result of intrinsic, intelligently provided information carried by the ancestor of lemurs, during a period when many new major categories of mammalian life arose." So, Jehovah stands on an East African beach, using CRSPR to stuff the genomes of a small batch of ur-lemurs with bunches of redundant functioning alleles before launching them on a raft-ride to Madagascar so that, on arrival, they can start individually losing various of these alleles to allow themselves to sort into novel species. This -- a divine being whose personal intervention is required for virtually every occurrence of genetic or morphological novelty -- may be the thought that comforts Behe, but if he expects it to bring many scientists into his fold, he may find the results disappointing. As lovely as the notion of a divinely-hosted prosimian going-away beach party may be, the evidence for it is scanty. The worst bits of books by Discovery Institute fellows often come when the authors decide to range into the philosophical realm, and Behe ends his book with some truly cringeworthy material. He insists that the whole issue is about "mind." He is so confused by the idea of people who think cognition comes from the brain that he repeatedly characterizes them as believing that minds do not exist at all. He supposes -- though how he does is not altogether clear -- that the existence of minds is itself a disproof of materialism. Along the way, he drops a lengthy endnote criticizing the Kitzmiller decision in which he mostly shows that he doesn't understand how litigation works. Yes, believe it or not, when judges ask for "proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law," they actually mean it. That last bit may be understandable, as Behe is undoubtedly aware that of all the nails in ID Creationism's coffin, the one he drove in with his disastrous testimony in Kitzmiller is one of the most secure. If resurrection is to be hoped for, it will not come from this book, which will convince nobody who is already reasonably well-versed in biology. But for the book's intended audience, who are not so well-versed, a warning: as creationists go, Behe is pretty much sui generis, and his views are as incompatible with the particular dogmas of most creationists as they are with the scientific consensus. He thinks that evolution happened, and does happen. He thinks that mutation and natural selection play important parts in evolution, even though he thinks they are somewhat limited. He affirms again in this book his acceptance of the common ancestry of all living things, and it's clear that he thinks that our common ancestor lived a lot longer than 6,000 years ago. If anybody thinks that this book is going to help him to defend the literal tale of Noah's ark, well -- that ship has sailed.