Darwin's Black Box

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996; second edition 2006) is a book by Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. In the book Behe presents his notion of irreducible complexity and argues that its presence in many biochemical systems therefore indicates that they must be the result of intelligent design rather than evolutionary processes. In 1993, Behe had written a chapter on blood clotting in Of Pandas and People, presenting essentially the same arguments but without the name "irreducible complexity," which he later presented in very similar terms in a chapter in Darwin's Black Box. Behe later agreed that he had written both and agreed to the similarities when he defended intelligent design at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial.

The book has received highly critical reviews by many scientists, arguing that the assertions made by Behe fail with logical scrutiny and amount to pseudoscience. For example, in a review for Nature, Jerry Coyne panned the book for what he saw as usage of quote mining and spurious ad hominem attacks. The New York Times also, in a critique written by Richard Dawkins, condemned the book for having promoted discredited arguments. Despite this, the book has become a commercial success, and, as a bestseller, it received a mostly supportive review from Publishers Weekly, which described it as having a "spirited, witty critique of neo-Darwinian thinking" that may "spark interest." The politically conservative magazine National Review also voted Darwin's Black Box one of their top 100 non-fiction books of the century, using a panel that included Discovery Institute member George Gilder.