Weber, Bruce H. “Biochemical Complexity: Emergence or Design?.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1, no. 4 (1998): 611-616.
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In Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Michael Behe restates in modern biochemical terms William Paley’s argument that there Is an irreducible functional compinity to living beings that suggests the action of a designer-creator. He repeats Paley’s challenge to science to provide a naturalistc explanation that can account robustly for such complexity and adaptation. Darwin responded to Paley’s challenge by suggesting that the mechanism of natural selection acting upon random, heritable variation could account for biological adaptation and descent with modification. Behe argues that Darwin could not have known what we now know about organisms and lineages of organism i at the biochemical and molecular level. This knowledge, he claims, stretches the explanatory power of Darwinian conceptions to and beyond their limit, leaving us only the alternative of intelligent design to explain the emergence of novel and complex structures and phenomena in living systems.