The new book from "intelligent design" proponent Michael Behe continues to receive highly critical reviews, with the latest, by Kenneth R. Miller, published (subscription required) in Nature (2007; 447: 1055-1056). Miller begins with the sociopolitical context, writing, "Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, is an attempt to give the intelligent-design movement a bit of badly needed scientific support. After a spectacular setback in the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania, intelligent-design trial ... , and the 2006 electoral losses in Ohio and Kansas, the movement could use some help -- and Behe is eager to provide it."

But Miller quickly moves to the content of the book, focusing on a central calculation that, Behe alleges, reveals the "limits of Darwinism." On the contrary, Miller writes: "at the heart of his anti-darwinian calculus are numbers not merely incorrect, but so spectacularly wrong that this badly designed argument collapses under its own weight ... It would be difficult to imagine a more breathtaking abuse of statistical genetics. ... A mistake of this magnitude anywhere in a book on science is bad enough, but Behe has built his entire thesis on this error."

Concluding, Miller returns to the sociopolitical context: "No doubt creationists who long for a scientific champion will overlook the parts of this deeply flawed book that might trouble them, including Behe's admission that 'common descent is true', and that our species shares a common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Instead, they will cling to Behe's mistaken calculations, and proclaim that the end of evolution is at hand. What this book actually demonstrates, however, is the intellectual desperation of the intelligent-design movement as it struggles to survive in the absence of even a shred of scientific data in its favour."

Miller is Professor of Biology at Brown University, the coauthor (with Joseph Levine) of three widely used high school biology textbooks, and the author of Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (Cliff Street Books, 1999), and the forthcoming Devil in the Details: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul (Viking/Penguin, 2007). He is also a Supporter of NCSE and received its Friend of Darwin award in 2003; he testified for the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the case in which it was ruled that it is unconstitutional to teach "intelligent design" creationism in the public schools.