Intelligent Design

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania, October 17 -- Michael J. Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh University, has spent the last eight years traveling to colleges promoting intelligent design as a challenge to the theory of evolution. . .

He says the "best and most striking example of design" is the bacterial flagellum, "the outboard motor bacteria use to swim." His projected drawing depicts what he calls a "rotary motor" attached to a "drive shaft" that pushes a propeller. He says it's impossible to avoid concluding that the mechanism represents a "purposeful arrangement of parts".

He was called as the first expert witness for the defense in the Dover, Pennsylvania federal trial where 11 parents are suing the Dover school board for requiring students to hear a statement about intellent design in a high school biology class. When asked whether intelligent design is religion, or "based on any religious beliefs," Mr. Behe said . .

"No, it isn't. It is based entirely on observable physical evidence from nature."

Mr. Behe is the author of Darwin's Black Box, a book published in 1996 that spurred the intelligent design movement.

Adapted from an article appearing in The New York Times, October 18, 2005.