Earlier this week, Gad Saad, an evolutionary psychologist and author of one of this year’s bestsellers, Suicidal Empathy (2026), tweeted his ridicule of Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe.

Behe is well known for doubting that the complexity of the life around us stems from the simple mechanism of Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation). His critique of the theory is based on the problem of irreducible complexity.

Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek quoted Behe’s point from an interview that “the evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution is weaker than you think.”

Saad responded at X:

Utter rubbish shite. Innumerable evolutionists have already refuted this nonsense including @RichardDawkins among many others. There is not a single scientific phenomenon that has received as much evidence across countless disciplines as is the case with evolution. There is more evidence for the veracity of evolution than there is for f**king gravity, and these types of clowns continue to spew their garbage. [expletive edited]

David Klinghoffer, editor of our sister publication Science & Culture Today, responded in turn at X,

You are a scholar and a proponent of evo psychology. A post like is nothing more than vulgar insults. Why don’t you tell you us why you think Behe’s evidence and arguments fail compared with Dawkins’s? Otherwise, what’s the point of your writing anything at all on the subject?

And, surprisingly, Klinghoffer wasn’t by any means alone in taking that approach.

An unexpected development

When I first saw Saad’s post on November 9, I had expected the replies to be dominated by Darwinian vulgarists — who may never have read a word Behe said — piling on to help shout Behe down. Certainly, fifteen years ago, that’s what would have happened.

But as it turned out, many of the replies framed the same sort of thought as Klinghoffer’s: Do you understand what Behe is actually saying about irreducible complexity? Why don’t you think it matters whether you do or not?

Yes, a significant number of commenters appeared to believe that understanding the issues matters more somehow than blind loyalty to Darwinism.

Meanwhile, if Saad wanted publicity for his view, he certainly got his wish. He is up to 263.7K views as of today. And the Darwinians may well have come flooding in to overwhelm and shut down the discussion since then. But the tenor of the early responses remains unexpected and telling.

At Science & Culture Today, Klinghoffer writes, reflecting on the episode,

If he had any notion why Behe is wrong on the science, Saad could have shared that. As a cherry on top, he includes a vacuous appeal to authority — that of Richard Dawkins, whose recent non-debate debate with Stephen Meyer in the pages of The Telegraph indicated that Dawkins’s own familiarity with the arguments for ID is also lacking. They don’t make atheists the way they used to. (November 11, 2026)

A couple of thoughts going forward…

I am skeptical of Saad’s discipline, evolutionary psychology, for the same reason as I am skeptical of exobiology (theories about life in other parts of the universe):

They are both disciplines without a subject.

Please understand, I am happy to write about the possibilities re life on other planets and often have. It’s fun and instructive, but it is all speculation at present.

The situation with evolutionary psychology is actually much worse than that: if the psychology has anything to do with evolution, we would need access to the living minds of prehumans — and there are none available.

But there’s another, more recent development at work. It’s not an accident that so many initial reactions to Saad’s comments were puzzled critiques.

Professor Saad needs to update his thinking a bit

Darwinism seems to be losing its lustre. The 50-year anniversary of Richard Dawkins’s ultra-Darwinian The Selfish Gene was greeted at Scientific American and Nature in a surprisingly critical way.

Similarly, for many years, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who proposed an alternative approach to evolution, was widely ridiculed, even in textbooks, at the behest of Darwinists. But that is being challenged now, as Stanford historian Jessica Riskin’s book The Power of Life (2026) shows. Evolution no longer means Darwinism.

Merely claiming that Behe’s critique of Darwinism is self-evidently “utter rubbish” is no longer the win Saad thinks it is, even among those who are well-disposed to him.

Behe and colleagues are not the ones causing trouble for evolutionary biologists

One other thing, while we are here: The people causing trouble for evolutionary biologists are not design theorists like Behe. They are gender ideologues who refuse to accept that humans are sex binary, like all primate mammals. Believing that, for example, children can be born in the “wrong body,” they have Canceled prominent evolutionary biologists on a number of occasions.

This is a big topic for another day but, in general, the big threat to science today is not from researchers who come to a different conclusion via evidence-based reasoning but from those who, for ideological reasons, declare war on reason and evidence. And neither their numbers nor their influence are fading.