This is a letter to the editor that Dr. Alberts, who, by the way, was the president of the National Academy of Sciences for 12 years, right?
A. I am aware of that. Q. This is a letter to the editor that Dr. Alberts published in the New York Times. And I’m going to read it to you. An please tell me if I’ve quoted it correctly. In Design for Living, on February 7, Michael J. Behe quoted me recalling how I discovered that the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered some 40 years ago. Dr. Behe then paraphrases my 1998 remarks that the entire cell can be viewed as a factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. That I was unaware of the complexity of living things as a student should not be surprising. In fact, the majestic chemistry of life should be astounding to everyone. But these facts should not be misrepresented as support for the idea that life’s molecular complexity is a result of intelligent design. To the contrary, modern scientific views of the molecular o
