[3][4] Behe serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
[8]As of 2024, his faculty webpage states: "My arguments about irreducible complexity and intelligent design are my own, and are not endorsed either by Lehigh University in general or by the Department of Biological Sciences in particular.
[14] The 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard U.S. Supreme Court decision barred the required teaching of creation science from public schools but allowed evolutionary theory on the grounds of scientific validity.
After the decision, a later draft of the textbook Of Pandas and People (1989) systematically replaced each and every cognate of the word "creation" with the phrase "intelligent design" or similar ID terms.
[15] The books of lawyer Phillip E. Johnson on theistic realism dealt directly with criticism of evolutionary theory and its purported biased "materialist" science, and aimed to legitimize the teaching of creationism in schools.
In 1993, the "Johnson-Behe cadre of scholars" met at Pajaro Dunes, California, and Behe presented for the first time his idea of irreducibly complex molecular machinery.
In 1997, Russell Doolittle, on whose work Behe based much of the blood-clotting discussion in Darwin's Black Box, wrote a rebuttal to the statements about irreducible complexity of certain systems.
[28] Numerous scientists have debunked the work, pointing out that not only has it been shown that a supposedly irreducibly complex structure can evolve, but that it can do so within a reasonable time even subject to unrealistically harsh restrictions, and noting that Behe and Snoke's paper does not properly include natural selection and genetic redundancy.
When the issue raised by Behe and Snoke is tested in the modern framework of evolutionary biology, numerous simple pathways to complexity have been shown.
In this book Behe's central assertion is that Darwinian evolution actually exists but plays only a limited role in the development and diversification of life on Earth.
Starting from this example, he takes into account the number of mutations required to "travel" from one genetic state to another, as well as population size for the organism in question.
Behe also promotes intelligent design in his 2019 book, Darwin Devolves[38] whose central premise is that the combination of random mutation and natural selection, apart from being incapable of generating novelty, is mainly a degradative force.
Like his previous books, Darwin Devolves received negative reviews from the scientific community, including a scathing review in Science by Nathan H. Lents, Richard Lenski, and S. Joshua Swamidass,[39] a harsh critique by Jerry Coyne in The Washington Post,[40] and a scholarly rebuttal in Evolution from Gregory Lang and Amber Rice, Behe's colleagues at Lehigh University.
"[42] Lang and Rice's assessment noted that while Behe rightfully acknowledges that organisms have common ancestry, it is posited that a designer is required for more distant relationships like at the family level, and that the presentation of degradative processes is exaggerated with evidence of beneficial adaptations dodged.
They then concluded with examples of adaptation that contradict the book's conclusions and expound on the flaws of Irreducible Complexity, adding that "why evolution by natural selection is difficult for so many to accept is beyond the scope of this review; however, it is not for a lack of evidence.
[58] The case was filed by Association of Christian Schools International, which argued that the University of California was being discriminatory by not recognizing science classes that use creationist books.
[58] The 2005 filing claimed that University of California's rejection of several of their courses was illegal "viewpoint discrimination and content regulation prohibited by the Free Speech Clause.