If natural selection could preserve a presently meaningless mutation because it might become useful later on when other new mutations occur, this would imply that evolution is a purposeful process, supervised by a preexisting mind. As we have seen, supervised evolution is a gradualist version of creationism. As materialists use the term, it is not evolution at all. Molecular mechanisms are irreducibly complex. What this means is simply that they are made up of many parts that interact in complex ways, and all the parts need to work together.
Any single part has no useful function unless all the other parts are also present.
There is therefore no pathway of functional intermediate stages by which a Darwinian process could build such a system step by step. Molecular mechanisms, Behe says, are as obviously designed as a spaceship or a computer. Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation. Yet Marx and Freud have fallen, and even their dwindling bands of followers no longer claim that their insights were based on any methodology remotely comparable to that of experimental science.