Like Michael Behe, I read a book by another Michael. Behe and I had the same reaction: Why haven’t we heard any of this stuff before? The answer is that questioning Darwinian orthodoxy essentially represents committing suicide in academia — an institution that promotes tolerance, diversity, free thought, and skepticism as the highest virtues — but which punishes any deviation from Darwinian dogma with draconian suppression, no matter how logical or evidential the challenges might be.
Michael Denton, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, challenged that dogma, with no theological or philosophical precommitment as far as I can tell. I would encourage everyone with intellectual curiosity to read that book.
The following I find to be one of his most revealing observations concerning the reality of life:
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter, so each atom in it would be the size of a tennis ball, and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast spaceship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.
We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines… We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices used for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction… However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours…
Unlike our own pseudo-automated assembly plants, where external controls are being continually applied, the cell’s manufacturing capability is entirely self-regulated…
[Denton, Michael, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler, 1986, pp. 327 – 331.]