He began with Michael Behe and a short description of his
irreducibly complexity argument regarding the bacterial
flagellum--that since it fails to function if any piece is
removed, and it's too complex to have originated by evolution in
a single step, it must have been intelligently designed and
created. He observed that 2,000 years ago, Galen made the same
argument about the human hand and other aspects of human and
animal anatomy. Galen wrote that "the mark of intelligent design
is clear in those works in which the removal of any small
component brings about the ruin of the whole." Behe, Carrier
said, hasn't done what you'd expect a scientist to do with
respect to his theory. He hasn't looked at the genes that code
the flagellum and tried to identify correlate genes in other
microbes, for example. In the ancient context, the debate was
between those who argued for natural selection on random
arrangements of features that were spontaneously generated, such
as Anaxagoras and atomists like Democritus and Epic