Michael Behe



Michael J. Behe (b. Born::January 18, 1952) is a leading advocate of the intelligent design movement. He is perhaps best known for an intelligent design test he devised known as irreducible complexity, which he details in his book Darwin's Black Box. He is now a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, and a fellow of the International Society for Complexity Information and Design. Behe's current research involves computer simulation of the evolution of protein binding sites.

Behe was born in 1952 and grew up in as a Roman Catholic attending Parochial schools in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 1974 he graduated from Drexel University with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 researching sickle-cell disease for his dissertation. He worked as a post doctorate at the National Institutes of Health from 1978 until 1982. And from 1982 to 1985, he was assistant professor of chemistry at Queens College in New York City, which is where he met his wife, Celeste. They are happily married and have 9 children. Today Michael Behe is a tenured professor of biochemistry in the Department of Biological Sciences, at Lehigh University.

Although he remained a devout Catholic, Behe grew up believing evolutionism until he read Michael Denton's book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Dr. Behe accepts the ancient age of the earth (billions of years), and has said that he has no particular reason to doubt common descent.

Publications
Books
 * Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution Published by: The Free Press, New York.
 * The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism Published by: The Free Press, New York.

Articles
 * Darwin's Hostages: A decision in Kansas to question evolution dogma has given rise to hysteria and intolerance by Michael Behe December 1, 1999.
 * Experimental Support for Regarding Functional Classes of Proteins to be Highly Isolated from Each Other Paper by Michael Behe presented at the 1992 SMU Symposium and printed in the conference proceedings "Darwinism, Science or Philosophy?".
 * Evidence for Intelligent Design from Biochemistry by Michael Behe August 10, 1996.
 * Fatuous Filmmaking by Michael Behe September 2001 article for World Net Daily about the PBS "Evolution" Series.
 * Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference by Michael Behe
 * Teach Evolution and Ask Hard Questions by Michael Behe. Article from The New York Times August 13, 1999 in which Behe discusses the Kansas School Board Controversy over removing evolution from the State examinations.
 * Design for Living by Michael Behe. New York Times, February 7, 2005.
 * Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues by Michael Behe and D. Snoke. Protein Science (2004), 13:2651-2664. (PDF file)
 * A response to Michael Lynch Protein Sci. 14:2226-7. Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residue - written by: Michael Hebe and D. Snoke
 * Darwin Under the Microscope by Michael Behe. New York Times. October 29, 1996.
 * Reply to My Critics: A Response to Reviews of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Biology  and Philosophy Biology and Philosophy, Volume 16, Number 5, November 2001, pp. 683-707(25)
 * Self-Organization and Irreducibly Complex Systems: A Reply to Shanks and Joplin. Philosophy of SciencePhilosophy of Science 67 (March 2000), Published by: The University of Chicago Press August 31, 2000
 * Embryology and evolution by: Michael J. Behe, Klaus Sander, and Roland Bender. Science 17 July 1998: Vol. 281. no. 5375, pp. 347 - 351
 * Teach Evolution—And Ask Hard QuestionsPublished by Michael Behe. New York Times, August 13, 1999 p. A21.
 * Tracts of adenosine and cytidine residues in the genomes of prokaryotes and eukaryotes by Michael Behe. DNA Sequence. 1998;8(6):375-83.
 * Oligoadenosine tracts favor nucleosome formation by Michael Behe. Mitochondrial DNA, Volume 8, Issue 6 March 1998, pages 375 - 383.
 * Non-conservative mutations are well tolerated in the globular region of yeast histone H4 by Michael Behe. Journal of Molecular Biology, Volume 255, Issue 3, 26 January 1996, Pages 401-411.