Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Behe

Behe is doing something rhetorically savvy here: he’s laundering a present-day dispute through the prestige of history. By invoking Haeckel and Huxley as emblematic figures who supposedly faced “a key piece” of science that “was beyond the understanding of the age,” he invites the reader to treat today’s missing explanations not as red flags but as normal growing pains. The move is less about those Victorian debates than about granting contemporary doubt an honorary pedigree.

The phrasing “many other examples” is a tell. It gestures toward a pattern without committing to specifics, creating the impression of an established historical rhythm: science bumps into a wall, time passes, the wall dissolves, and the skeptics look wise in retrospect. “Key piece of a particular scientific puzzle” adds a comforting metaphor of inevitability; puzzles are meant to be solved. The subtext is patience-as-proof: if we can’t yet account for some crucial mechanism, that absence should be read as a temporary limitation of “the age,” not a problem for the broader framework Behe is implicitly challenging.

Context matters because Behe is a scientist best known for arguing that certain biological systems are best explained by intelligent design. This line functions as a strategic reframing of gaps in evolutionary explanation. Instead of “we don’t know,” it offers “they didn’t know either,” positioning current uncertainty as historically validated rather than evidentiary. It’s an appeal to humility that doubles as a wedge: the reader is nudged to see mainstream science as periodically myopic, and the contrarian as history’s early adopter.