Science Quote by Michael Behe

A tidy sentence like this does a lot of rhetorical smuggling. On its face, Michael Behe is making a bland, mainstream point: proteins rarely act alone. Cells are full of complexes, pathways, and assemblies where parts only make sense in concert. But the phrase "simply components" is doing the work. It downshifts the protein from star actor to interchangeable part, nudging the reader to picture biology less as chemistry in motion and more as hardware: gears, housings, and "machines" with discrete roles.

That metaphor matters because Behe is famous less for bench science than for arguing that certain biological systems are best understood as irreducibly complex - the kind of thing that, in his framing, can’t be built gradually by natural selection. So the context isn’t neutral pedagogy; it’s a scene-setting move. If you can get an audience to see the cell as a factory floor, you’ve already tilted the debate toward design-y intuitions: machines have architects, assemblies have blueprints, components imply prior integration.

The subtext is also strategic modesty. By stating something most biologists would accept, Behe establishes common ground before steering toward a more contentious inference. It’s a classic wedge: start with the unarguable (complexes exist), then invite the slippery next thought (complexes require foresight). The sentence is persuasive precisely because it sounds like a lab manual while quietly swapping in an engineering worldview.