Science Quote by Michael Behe

Behe’s line is less a scientific observation than a courtroom move: concede the jury’s favorite point, then attack the foundation. He grants Darwin the “modern eye” to sound fair-minded, then pivots to a narrower gap he can frame as decisive: not the evolution of complexity, but the functionality of the alleged starting stage. The phrasing is calibrated for doubt. “Persuade much of the world” implies social triumph rather than empirical closure, smuggling in the suggestion that evolution’s success is rhetorical, even fashionable. “Did not even attempt” sharpens the charge into negligence, as if Darwin avoided the hardest part because it was unanswerable.

The subtext is strategic: if the first step can’t be shown to work, the whole staircase looks suspect. That’s a signature intelligent-design gambit, especially in Behe’s orbit: shift the burden from “here’s a plausible pathway” to “explain every mechanistic detail at the origin point.” It’s also a way to make a historical figure stand in for an entire research program; Darwin’s 19th-century limits are used as a proxy for what evolutionary biology can or cannot explain now.

Context matters because Darwin actually did sketch incremental utility (light sensitivity to directional sensing), but Behe’s interest isn’t Darwin’s completeness. It’s the optics of incompleteness. By focusing on “how it actually worked,” he turns a question biology can answer in modern terms (photoreceptor chemistry, selective advantage of crude sensing) into a rhetorical wedge: if there’s any lingering uncertainty, the alternative story gets to walk in looking like rigor.