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"The world as we know it was created by a fortuitous collision of atoms."
-- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book V

[Editor's note: A correction ran concerning this story; see end of article.]

ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 24, ABOUT 500 PEOPLE squeezed into the lecture hall at the Tate Laboratory of Physics on the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus. There were none of the usual Friday night attractions— no music, no beer, no sports. A celebrity of sorts had come to town. Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, is best known for his 1996 bestseller Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. The book made Behe one of the leading voices of the intelligent design movement, and a hero to religious conservatives who have long yearned for credentialed scientists to take up their cause. At the time of his appearance at the U, Behe was just a few weeks removed from his star turn as a defense witness in the so-called Scopes Two trial in Pennsylvania—the highly publicized legal melodrama occasioned by a local school board's decision to include intelligent design in its high school science curriculum.

A short, balding man with the prepossessing manner of a lifelong lecturer, Behe was greeted at the lectern with a torrent of applause. As he began to click through his Power Point presentation, he offered a simple declaration: ID theory, he said, is not "mystical" in nature. It is a matter of common sense. Life on earth is simply too complex not to have been designed. A click of his mouse then revealed a schematic diagram of a mousetrap. For the mousetrap to function properly, Behe explained, each component must be in the right place. The complex arrangement of parts proves that the mousetrap was designed by some intelligent being. In Behe's view, all sorts of other biological mechanisms—the mechanisms that allow people to talk, that enable bacteria to swim in petri dishes—cannot be accidental or random. At that, he dropped in the descriptive phrase for which he is best known. Life, he intoned, is "irreducibly complex," too sophisticated to be explained by Darwinian notions of natural selection and random mutation.

"The evidence for design," Behe said repeatedly, "is the purposeful arrangement of the parts." Though he talked for a long time, this was in effect his entire argument. Ironically, his mousetrap analogy is a direct restatement of the clockmaker analogy that was popular among self-styled "deists" during the Age of Enlightenment 300 years ago. But the deists were a pallid lot as believers go; they promulgated the idea that God the clockmaker had constructed the whole thing and left it to run as dictated by the workings of the pieces he made. Prominent deists from Voltaire to Thomas Jefferson were, ironically, among the leading critics of religious intolerance and superstition in their day. Evangelicals they were not—poisoned by the then-fresh virus of humanism, they preferred to live and let live.

Not so the latter-day intelligent design advocates: Just last week, the New York Times reported they had won a major battle before the Kansas State Board of Education. "In the course of revising the state's science standards to include criticism of evolution," wrote the Times, "the board promulgated a new definition of science itself. The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: 'natural explanations.' But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science."

And what is the identity of the designer, in Behe's view? On this point the author, like many of his fellows at the influential pro-ID think tank, the Discovery Institute, is conspicuously silent. And for good cause. Creationists—people who believe literally in the Genesis account of a world made in six days some few thousand years ago—have been slapped down by courts again and again in past attempts to gain entree to public school classrooms. Why go willingly into that lion's den?

In the question-and-answer period that followed Behe's 70-minute presentation, it became clear that the majority of those in attendance were ID acolytes. This was no surprise. His appearance was sponsored by the MacLaurin Institute, a nonprofit "Christian study center" based at the U of M. The institute, which boasts such hard-right conservatives as Minnesota Family Council president Tom Prichard on its board of advisers, aims to bring "God to the marketplace of ideas." The lecture also got heavy advance promotion from local Christian media, notably the Bible college radio station KTIS.

Still, not everyone at the lecture was an ID supporter. Sprinkled among the credulous were a handful of skeptical biology students and professors, along with a contingent from the organization of ultimate nonbelievers, the Minnesota Atheists. While the anti-ID folk were outnumbered, they had an advocate of their own in attendance—a 48-year-old associate professor of biology from the University of Minnesota Morris named PZ Myers. Myers was seated in the front row. With his wireless spectacles, khaki slacks, and gray-dappled beard, he looked every bit the earnest academic. But the truth about Myers is more complicated. Sometimes he is the mild-mannered professor, absorbed by scientific minutiae. But when the spirit moves him, he is a fiery cultural critic, bent on keeping the religious right from hijacking school curricula even if it means taking apart their arguments point by point in settings where people used to know better.

As Behe moved from his mousetrap analogy into technical discussion of bacterial flagellum, blood-clotting mechanisms, and other scientific-sounding subjects, Myers listened intently. Occasionally, he tapped notes into the laptop computer that he totes with him everywhere. When Behe launched into his more pointed critiques of the received wisdom of generations of evolutionary science, an expression of distaste would flicker across Myers's face, and the pace of his typing would quicken.

Before Behe uttered his first word, Myers outlined the lecture we would hear, punctuating his list of Behe's talking points with off-the-cuff observations about the Lehigh professor's "atrocious modeling" and intellectual sleight of hand. He made no effort to conceal his disdain. "There's a stereotype that academics are all dry and dusty, tweed and elbow patches and pipes in mouth. But it's just not true," Myers explained. "In science, we scream a lot."

Yet as Myers braced for the Behe lecture at the U, he seemed weary. The 160-mile drive from his home in Morris couldn't have helped. But more than that, Myers didn't want to be here, didn't want to spend another evening listening to the same old attacks on science. "Bad movies can be fun, but this isn't going to be," he warned. "I'm only here out of a sense of obligation, because if I want to be a credible source in arguing against creationism, I have to be aware of what creationists are saying. If I shut my eyes and ears, I don't think I can be a legitimate critic."

By the time he finally published his assessment of the Behe lecture, Myers's palpable fatigue had given way to a feistier, more polemical air. Behe's arguments, Myers wrote, "exceeded my expectations of suckiness. It was an evening of phony rhetoric, smug self-aggrandizement, and utter vacuity—and the audience of complacent Christians ate it up. That part of the audience that consisted of atheists and competent scientists and, I presume, honest Christians found it appalling." After that, Myers dissected Behe's technical contentions in considerable detail before concluding as follows:

"Behe talked for an hour, and in all that time he didn't give one specific hypothesis, he didn't describe any evidence, and he didn't propose one single line of research that an ID-friendly scientist could follow. This was a completely empty talk, a hollow shell with a few buzzwords and fallacious analogies to make his cheerleaders happy. He's a fraud. I can't say that it was an entirely wasted evening, though. I learned that Intelligent Design creationism is still dead in the water, and that one of the few legitimately credentialed scientists working within the movement is still an empty babbler without a whisper of scientific support; the most amusing part of the talk was his opening line, when he gave a disclaimer that the provost of his university wanted him to say, that his views do not represent Lehigh University."

FOR ABOUT A DOZEN YEARS, PZ Myers has been among the fiercest, most public critics of the intelligent design movement. An early convert to the internet, he first embarked on the mission by posting on a Usenet group called Talkorigins. Over the years, he has poked away at ID in other forums, too, most notably in a well-regarded evolution-themed group blog called the Panda's Thumb. But Myers owes most of his notoriety to the personal weblog he created two and a half years ago, Pharyngula.org. The blog's name is a reference to the stage in development of vertebrate embryos in which various species most resemble each other. Given the obscurity of the domain name—and the often esoteric subject matter—it is a minor miracle that Myers has been able to cultivate such a large and loyal following. A Google search of his name yields more than a quarter of a million results. According to Alexa, the Amazon.com-owned website-ranking page, Pharyngula's idiosyncratic musings on science, culture, and politics—and his claw-hammer critiques of ID—have made him the most-read Minnesota blogger after the popular right-wing mainstays Power Line and Captain's Quarters.

Lately, Myers says, Pharyngula has averaged some 13,000 visitors a day. On busy days—typically, those days when Myers has posted one of his screeds on ID shenanigans—the count spikes into the 25,000 range. That is an impressive amount of traffic for a personal blog, especially one that doesn't offer the spectacle of coitus—or much of it, anyway. As befits a biologist's journal, Pharyngula follows assiduously the latest scientific findings regarding the sexual habits of creatures such as the giant squid. (As it turns out, giant squid mate by firing bulletlike globs of sperm at anything that resembles another squid, male or female, often leaving the paramour injured). Myers is prone to lengthy scientific tangents on such matters, and occasional unscientific ones: "Just imagine it—great pelagic orgies, the males thrusting wantonly with their massive penile arms, promiscuously inseminating any nearby slickly molluscan body. Perhaps they end up sated and exhausted from their frenzied exertions and, oblivious and insensate, drift ashore to die content. Forget March of the Penguins. There's a great documentary to be made here: Squid Gone Wild. Cephalopod Sex Party. I want to see Michael Medved review it."

That last line is typical Myers. A shot of lively prose, followed by some sound science, with a political kicker tacked on for good measure. Given his left-atheist inclinations, it's no surprise that Myers has tussled with his rivals at Power Line. Myers fired the first shot, posting a response to blogger John Hinderaker's odd declaration that "Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds." Myers couldn't resist. After all, Hinderaker is an attorney and political activist, not a biologist. In a blistering retort, Myers wrote:

"On strictly scientific grounds? Hindrocket [Hinderaker's now-defunct nom de guerre] doesn't know any science. The 'macroevolution' canard is stock mindless creationism. The real outrage here is that a clueless nitwit like Hindrocket can claim the entire field of biology is a fraud and cannot stand up to scrutiny; I'd be happy to mop the floor with him in a debate, if he wants to try.... Time magazine really screwed the pooch when they named Power Line 'blog of the year'—they picked a site run by a few paranoid, extremist doofuses."

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