Behe, on Page 35, is discussing the presence of noxious chemicals in beetles—chemicals that lead predators to spit a beetle out, though only after they've chewed it up to a presumably lethal extent. Describing what he thinks is the standard Darwinian explanation for the evolution of such noxious compounds, Behe writes, "Initially a number of individual beetles are chewed up and spit out, but a predator learns to avoid their noxious counterparts in the future, and thus the species as a whole benefits from this defense."

According to modern Darwinian theory, natural selection doesn't generally design things for the good of the "the species as a whole." After all, if you imagine a gene that has recently been created by a mutation, it won't exist in the "species as a whole." So how would any contribution it makes to the "species as a whole" help the gene itself spread?

If the gene that Behe imagines—a beetle's gene that leads predators to spit out beetles after killing them and develop an aversion to eating future beetles—were indeed to thrive via natural selection, it would almost certainly do so via a dynamic known as "kin selection." That is, the gene—even if the result of a fairly recent mutation—might exist in close kin of the beetle in question. So, even if the gene that creates the noxious compound perishes along with this beetle, there are copies of the gene in nearby kin beetles—perhaps the very beetles the predator would have eaten if hadn't gotten disgusted by the noxious compound. So, in this scenario—unlike the "species as a whole" scenario—copies of the gene itself do thrive by virtue of the gene's noxious properties.

This distinction—between implausible "good of the species" logic and plausible kin-selection logic—is a standard part of Modern Darwinism 101, and Behe just failed the exam.