Science Quote by Michael Behe

Even in its mild, textbook cadence, Behe’s line is doing more than pointing out a fun fact about biology; it’s laying rhetorical track. By stressing “even by this limited number of examples,” he preemptively disarms the reader’s skepticism: you don’t need exhaustive data, he implies, because the pattern is already obvious. That’s a classic move in persuasive science writing, but in Behe’s hands it often functions as a gateway drug to larger claims about design and “irreducible complexity,” where the leap from “diverse functions” to “too complex for unguided evolution” is the real destination.

The word “amazingly” is the tell. It’s not neutral description; it’s a cue for awe. Awe can be a legitimate emotional response to biochemistry, but it also primes a particular inference: if something inspires wonder, maybe it needs a special explanation. Behe’s sentence flatters the reader into agreement while smuggling in a value judgment about what counts as surprising. The subtext is: this isn’t just variety, it’s variety that should make you pause and doubt standard accounts.

Context matters because proteins are, in mainstream evolutionary biology, the perfect poster child for how small changes can yield new functions via duplication, divergence, and selection. So the line sits at a crossroads: it can read as an uncontroversial observation in a lecture, or as the opening chord in an argument that tries to turn complexity into a prosecutorial exhibit. The intent isn’t to teach you proteins exist; it’s to get you emotionally aligned with the sense that their diversity demands more than ordinary mechanisms.