I originally posted this on myspace and now I thought I would share it here with you. For those of you who don't know, I don't much care for Intelligent Design (ID) or Creationism (which ID is just Creationism in a cheap tux, they are the same thing........pretty much). The problem isn't that the ID/Creation folks believe in god, it's that it isn't science. Sorry, but it's true. ID/Creationism provides no scientific data whatsoever and chooses to promote their ideas using politicians instead of the peer reviewed scientific community. But there will be more (trust me much much more) on that in the future.
The following article is about irreducible complexity (IC). IC is a dead horse that the ID folks keep on kicking (probably because it is the core of their whole position). Casey Luskin (a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.....the ID people) has come up with a new analogy for IC. And it fails miserablely. He uses the bicycle as his example of an irreducibly complex system. Appearently he thinks that if you remove a wheel, the bicycle can no longer function. I see already that most of you (those of you that know what IC is) see the problem with this analogy. But before we get to Casey's misfiring, let's define what IC is.
Michael Behe (the most famous IDer) defines IC as:
A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. (Darwin's Black Box p39 in the 2006 edition)
Unfortunately for Michael and his ID cohorts, they have not been able find any examples for IC. Don't think that they haven't tried. Behe's famous example is the bacterial flagellum. But this example was shown to be wrong by Ken Miller at the Dover Trial. When you remove most of the parts of the flagellum you end up with a syringe. This shows how the flagellum is not irreducibly complex.
The analogy that Behe touts is that the bacterial flagellum is like a mouse trap, you take one part of the mouse trap away and it doesn' work. So what good is a mouse trap that is missing the hammer for instance? It wouldn't be very effective at killing mice would it? Actually, a mouse trap with just it's base is still going to be able to catch mice. Now, it may not be very effective at doing it but it still may be able to trip a mouse and break it's neck or something to the like. So, from there, the rest of the parts can be selected for to eventually become what we know as the modern mouse trap.
On to the real science writer, Carl Zimmer a wonderful science journalist who wrote the following article.
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REPOSTED FROM: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2008/12/30/oh-no-ive-seen-the-impossible-my-eyes/
Oh No! I've Seen the Impossible! My Eyes!
Ah, the things you learn from creationists…
If you've ever read about intelligent design (a k a "the progeny of creationism"), you've probably encountered their favorite buzz words, "irreducible complexity." If you take a piece out of a complex biological system (like the cascade of blood-clotting proteins) and it fails to work, this is taken as evidence that the system could not have evolved. After all, without all the pieces in place, it couldn't work.
Scientists have shown over and over again that this is a false argument. At the famous intelligent-design trial in Dover in 2005, Pennsylvania, for example, Brown biologist Ken Miller showed how dolphins and other species are missing various proteins found in our blood-clotting cascade, and they can still clot blood. (Here's Miller on Youtube giving a lecture on the experience–the blood starts to clot at 39:00.)
Three years later, the creationists are still trying to salvage irreducible complexity. This generally involves a bait-and-switch game. Today, for example, the Discovery Institute tells us that the evidence of dolphins does not touch the argument for irreducible complexity. See, what you have here are two different irreducibly complex systems, with one that just happens to have an extra part. Just think about bicycles…
"Bicycles have two wheels. Unicycles, having only one wheel, are missing an obvious component found on bicycles. Does this imply that you can remove one wheel from a bicycle and it will still function? Of course not. Try removing a wheel from a bike and you'll quickly see that it requires two wheels to function. The fact that a unicycle lacks certain components of a bicycle does not mean that the bicycle is therefore not irreducibly complex."
Of course not. No. It's not as if five seconds of googling could turn up a bicycle that still functioned without both wheels…
Hey! You there! Get off that bike! You're ruining a metaphor!
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