Science Quote by Michael Behe

Behe’s line reads like a modest procedural demand, but it’s really a jurisdictional claim: you don’t get to say “we understand this” unless you can narrate every causally relevant micro-step from start to finish. In a lab, that instinct can be healthy. In public argument, it’s also a power move, because it quietly raises the standard of “understanding” to something closer to omniscience than to workable scientific knowledge.

The phrasing does two things at once. “Some function” sounds neutral, almost blandly methodological, but it’s doing strategic work: it invites the reader to imagine high-stakes biological feats (blood clotting, immune response, cellular machinery) where mechanisms are sprawling and messy. Then “every relevant step” smuggles in the hardest part. Relevance is not a property you discover; it’s a judgment you defend. In complex systems biology, you often understand enough to predict, intervene, or model behavior without possessing a complete, exhaustive causal storyboard. Behe’s criterion implies that partial mechanistic accounts, statistical models, and evolutionary narratives don’t qualify as understanding until they’re fully itemized.

That’s the context where the quote bites. Behe is a central figure in the intelligent design movement, and this sentence functions as a rhetorical lever against evolutionary explanations: if there’s any gap in the step-by-step account, the whole claim of understanding is treated as premature. The subtext is less “be careful” than “call it ignorance until it’s exhaustive,” a stance that can turn normal scientific incompleteness into a permanent indictment. It’s persuasive because it sounds like rigor; it’s controversial because it can make “unknown” do the work of “impossible.”