Science Quote by Michael Behe

Behe’s line is engineered to do two things at once: downgrade a dominant method in modern biology (sequence comparison) and borrow Darwin’s prestige while implying Darwin didn’t really solve the problem either. The rhetorical move is classic: concede the fame, deny the payoff. By pairing “simply can’t account” with an analogy to Darwin’s eyes, Behe frames evolutionary explanation as a kind of category error - as if tracing similarities is just stamp-collecting, not a mechanism.

The subtext is less about eyes than about authority. Behe isn’t arguing that sequence comparisons are useless; he’s arguing they are insufficient for what matters most: the origin of “complex biochemical systems,” his home turf in the intelligent design debate. That phrase is doing heavy lifting. “Complex” primes the reader to expect a missing piece; “biochemical systems” shifts the battleground from fossils and morphology to molecular machinery, where intuition tends to say “someone built this.”

Context matters: Behe’s broader project (especially in Darwin’s Black Box) is to position evolutionary biology as good at explaining small tweaks but fundamentally thin on the step-by-step assembly of multi-part systems. Invoking Darwin’s “simple to complex eye” comparison is strategic, because Darwin famously used it as a plausibility argument: show gradations, and the path doesn’t look impossible. Behe flips that: plausibility is not a blueprint. The line works by exploiting a real tension in science communication - evidence of relatedness versus narratives of construction - and turning that gap into doubt about the whole enterprise.