Science Quote by Michael Behe

The move here is calculated admiration: Behe lingers on the 19th century eye not to celebrate Victorian biology, but to set a trap for the modern reader. He paints anatomy as already "known in great detail" and "sophisticated", then underscores that it "astounded everyone". That word choice matters. Astounded isn’t neutral; it cues awe, and awe is the emotional gateway to Behe’s larger project: arguing that complexity should be read as design rather than as the product of incremental evolutionary change.

The historical framing is doing double duty. By invoking the 19th century, Behe taps an era when natural theology and Darwinism collided, when the eye was a famous stress test for evolution (Darwin himself anticipated the objection). Saying the mechanisms were understood "in great detail" subtly suggests that scientific progress didn’t dissolve the mystery; it deepened it. The subtext: the more you learn, the less plausible unguided processes feel.

But the sentence is also carefully selective. It trades in a generalized "everyone", smoothing over the fact that astonishment isn’t an argument and that 19th century biology also contained intense debates, wrong turns, and missing pieces (genetics, population theory) that later made evolutionary explanations more powerful, not less. Behe’s intent is rhetorical: recruit the prestige of scientific detail to validate a feeling - that intricate coordination looks authored. The line functions as a preface to "irreducible complexity" thinking, where wonder is positioned not as the beginning of inquiry, but as a verdict.