The Guardian has published a pathetic interview with Behe. The interviewer, John Sutherland, is clearly out of his depth and allows real howlers to slide by, and in a few cases, even helps Behe along.

But the question is: exactly how did life get here? Was it by natural selection and random mutation or was it by something else? Everybody - even Richard Dawkins - sees design in biology. You see this design when you see co-ordinated parts coming together to perform a function - like in a hand. And so it's the appearance of design that everybody's trying to explain. So that if Darwin's theory doesn't explain it we're left with no other explanation than maybe it really was designed. That's essentially the design argument.

Yes it is; things "look" like they were designed. That's all there is to design, so can we be done with it now? People also see Jesus in a potato chip, but no one with any sense takes that as a credible, legitimate sort of evidence.

JS: Why do you think we should replay the Darwinian controversies of 1860 and the 1925 Scopes monkey trial? MB: Because we have new data. It's because science has advanced since then. We now know what the very foundation of life looks like. It's made up of molecules. Not just molecules but sophisticated molecular machinery.

This is another tired ploy out of the creationist playbook: it "looks" like design, and molecules "look" like machines! Reifying analogies is not a sensible way to do science, Dr Behe.

Irreducible complexity is a problem for Darwinian evolution. Whenever we see these complex functional systems we realise that they have to be designed.

Aaaargh. This is not true: irreducible complexity is not a problem for evolution, even the Darwinian kind. It's been explained before, it's in the FAQ, so it's annoying to see it repeated again and accepted without question by this clueless interviewer. I'm going to explain it one more time. Here's why IC is not a problem and even an accepted outcome of normal genetic processes.

Here's a pathway. Gene product A activates gene product B, which has some autocatalytic function (it activates itself) and which then activates gene product C. Nothing unusual here, this arrangement can be found all over cellular biochemistry, and Behe must know it.

Here's another common event: a gene duplication. An error in replication has made a copy of B, called B'. It's initially identical to B, has the same inputs and outputs, and basically acts like a simple redundant copy. This is probably a neutral event, but can also affect the activity of the pathway.

With a redundant copy, selective constraints are removed from evolution. If B' has a mutation that makes it unreceptive to activation from A (the red arrow from A to B'), the system still works. If that happened in the original pathway, there'd be no way to get to C from A…it would destroy the pathway. With that extra copy, though, there is an alternative path that allows the circuit to reroute around the damage.

Accumulate enough small changes, for instance knocking out all of the red arrows above, and a new, irreducibly complex pathway exists:

Duplication plus loss of function is the simple recipe for getting irreducibly complex systems. Behe looks at that and claims there is no way it can evolve. I've just shown you how it can evolve.

The conclusion of the interview is dazzling in its hubris, and Sutherland obligingly feeds him the creationist position.

JS: Has the National Academy of Science taken an interest?

MB: It takes a position strongly condemning it. The recently retired president, Bruce Albert, sent a letter to all 2,000 members of the NAS essentially naming me.

JS: Did Galileo come to mind?

MB: Yeah. In a way it's flattery.

Galileo? Why does every kook with a stupid idea that gets rejected by scientists compare himself to Galileo?

That statement that he's 'flattered' is remarkable. The letter from Bruce Albert to the NAS is not at all flattering—here's the part where he mentions Behe:

On February 7, 2005, Michael Behe, a founder and leading proponent of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, published a long Op-Ed in the New York Times in response to an editorial that the Times had released the previous week. In that letter, Dr. Behe claimed that some words I wrote support his view that scientific explanations for the evolution of life on the Earth need to be modified to insert the work of an "intelligent designer".

In my response to the Times, I pointed out that, while my words are reflected correctly in Behe's column, he completely misrepresents the intent of my statement. This is a common tactic among those who are attempting to introduce religious views of the origins of life into the public schools -- or who are trying to undermine the teaching of evolution because of purported "weaknesses" in the theory.

So Behe misinterprets and misrepresents a scientist's work, and when the scientist calls him on the outrage, Behe compares himself to Galileo and is flattered. Why, if he put on clown shoes and mumbled gibberish, and an audience of scientists laughed and threw overripe tomatoes at him, maybe he could get a promotion and be just like Newton and Einstein. Doesn't their fame rest on vacuous pronouncements and garbled scholarship, after all?