Science & Tech Quote by Michael Behe

The sly move here is the word “shock”: it frames Darwin not as a slow-burning intellectual revolution but as a cultural jump-scare, a moment when Victorian self-confidence got yanked off its pedestal. Behe’s sentence is doing double duty. On the surface, it sounds like a neutral nod to the historical impact of natural selection, praising its “elegant principle” and crediting “observations science had made.” That praise is strategic: it lets him appear fair-minded before the pivot his broader work is famous for - the claim that Darwin’s elegance doesn’t cash out everywhere biology asks it to.

Context matters because Behe is a leading voice in intelligent design, best known for arguing that certain cellular systems are too complex to be built by incremental selection. So when he spotlights nineteenth-century “shock,” he’s quietly inviting a parallel: if Darwin startled the Victorians by demoting human specialness, then perhaps modern readers should be open to being startled again by the limits of Darwinian explanation. The subtext is less “natural selection is wrong” than “natural selection became a master key too quickly.”

Even the construction “many features...could be ascribed” hedges. It’s not “all,” not “most,” not “explained.” It’s a careful concession that keeps the door open for exceptions. Behe’s intent is rhetorical positioning: affirm Darwin’s historic explanatory power while reserving space to argue that some of biology’s hardest cases might require an added principle - not just more time, more data, or more selection.