If man and gorillas had a common ancestor, why is man flying space shuttles and gorilla still eating each other's fleas?

What nonsense. For EVERY other species intelligence was not necessary to survive.

An interesting paper has just appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli.” (1) It is the “inaugural article” of Richard Lenski, who was recently elected to the National Academy. Lenski, of course, is well known for conducting the longest, most detailed “lab evolution” experiment in history, growing the bacterium E. coli continuously for about twenty years in his Michigan State lab. For the fast-growing bug, that’s over 40,000 generations!


I discuss Lenski’s fascinating work in Chapter 7 of The Edge of Evolution, pointing out that all of the beneficial mutations identified from the studies so far seem to have been degradative ones, where functioning genes are knocked out or rendered less active. So random mutation much more easily breaks genes than builds them, even when it helps an organism to survive. That’s a very important point. A process which breaks genes so easily is not one that is going to build up complex coherent molecular systems of many proteins, which fill the cell.

I think the results fit a lot more easily into the viewpoint of The Edge of Evolution. One of the major points of the book was that if only one mutation is needed to confer some ability, then Darwinian evolution has little problem finding it. But if more than one is needed, the probability of getting all the right ones grows exponentially worse. “If two mutations have to occur before there is a net beneficial effect — if an intermediate state is harmful, or less fit than the starting state — then there is already a big evolutionary problem.” (4) And what if more than two are needed? The task quickly gets out of reach of random mutation.

Behe says he once fully accepted the scientific theory of evolution, but that after reading Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, by Michael Denton, he came to question evolution.[14] Later, Behe came to believe that there was evidence, at a biochemical level, that there were systems that were "irreducibly complex". These were systems that he thought could not, even in principle, have evolved by natural selection, and thus must have been created by an "intelligent designer," which he believed to be the only possible alternative explanation for such complex structures.