Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Behe

Behe opens by reminding you how radically incomplete Darwin-era biology really was, then uses that historical gap as a lever. “Black box” is doing the heavy lifting: it’s a modern engineering metaphor smuggled into a 19th-century story, framing organisms less as messy, evolving life and more as sealed machines whose internal workings were unknowable. The phrase flatters contemporary readers too. We live in the age of biochemistry, genomes, and molecular mechanisms; we like to think we’ve “opened” the box. Behe’s intent is to make that contrast feel decisive, not incremental.

The subtext is a quiet critique of Darwin’s explanatory power. By stacking examples - “the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity” - Behe isn’t merely listing topics; he’s building a sense of total ignorance, then implying that natural selection’s early victories were achieved with the crucial part of the case missing. “Ultimately” sharpens the claim into a sweeping judgment: Darwin couldn’t explain “how biological processes occurred,” so his account was necessarily superficial.

Context matters because Behe is a central figure in the intelligent design movement. This line functions like stage-setting: if Darwin worked without mechanisms, then modern mechanistic detail becomes a potential pressure point against evolutionary explanations. Even if evolutionary biology has, in fact, built those mechanisms in layers over the past century, Behe’s rhetorical move is to reframe the progress as a challenge: now that we can see inside, do we like what we see?