Review of Michael Behe, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution (New York: HarperOne, 2019), 342 pages, hdbk. 

The author of this new book is well known for his earlier works Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution.  In the former book Michael Behe argued that biological systems, more especially the molecular makeup of incredibly complex structures in the cell, could not have arisen via evolutionary pathways.  Natural selection and mutation were simply not capable of building the city-like features that had only recently been discovered.  Nor could evolution explain how these structures (like the bacterial flagellum) be constructed as functioning wholes by the processes available to it.  The “irreducible complexity” of the structures meant that everything had to be put together at once in just the right way so that the molecular machine would work.  Not only this, but in The Edge of Evolution