Science Quote by Michael Behe

“Machinery” is doing heavy rhetorical lifting here. Behe isn’t merely offering a textbook definition of proteins; he’s smuggling in a worldview: life is best understood as engineered, modular, task-oriented hardware. In one clean metaphor, proteins stop being messy, improvisational molecules and become parts with jobs, components in a system that “builds” and “carries out” work. That framing matters because it quietly narrows the range of acceptable explanations. If proteins are machines, then the organism starts to look like an artifact - something assembled, optimized, and legible in terms of design.

The specific intent is pedagogical on the surface, persuasive underneath. “Machinery of living tissue” emphasizes function over origin: what proteins do, not how they arose. It’s a strategic focus for Behe, a prominent advocate of intelligent design, whose broader project often leans on the intuition that highly coordinated molecular systems resemble human-made contraptions. By calling proteins machinery, he invites the reader to feel that intuition before any argument is made.

Context sharpens the subtext. In mainstream biology, proteins are indeed molecular machines, but the phrase usually sits inside a story about evolution: tinkering, duplication, selection, and historical contingency. Behe’s line trims that narrative away and leaves a sleek, purposeful system. It’s persuasive because it’s true in the lab and evocative in the mind, turning biochemical complexity into something that sounds, almost inevitably, like it must have been built.