Holt on Behe in New York Times Magazine

By Dave Thomas

There’s an interesting piece by Jim Holt in the February 20th, 2005 issue of New York Times magazine, entitled “Unintelligent Design.” Holt makes some interesting observations, like this one:

In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

He also says something quite curious about Michael Behe:

But what if the designer did not style each species individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has suggested.Behe says that the little protein machines in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation – an opinion that his scientific peers overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind chance. (emphasis added)

I’m curious, Thumbers and Lurkers - do you think this is a correct statement of Behe’s views?

Thanks, Dave