1. Rebuttal:
Argument From Irreducible Complexity
Argument From Irreducible Complexity
Summary:
Complex interdependent systems, like eyes or blood clotting, cannot evolve all at once. They must have been designed.
Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
“...The most striking examples of ‘the contrivances of nature’ are to be found in the biological domain, and it is to these that [William] Paley devoted much of his attention. In biology the adaptation of means to ends is legendary. Consider the eye, for example. It is hard to imagine that this organ is not meant to provide the faculty of sight. Or that the wings of a bird aren’t there for the purpose of flight. To Paley and many others, such intricate and successful adaptation bespoke providential arrangement by an intelligent designer. Alas, we all know about the speedy demise of this argument. Darwin’s theory of evolution demonstrated decisively that complex organization efficiently adapted to the environment could arise as a result of random mutations and natural selection. No designer is needed to produce an eye or a wing. Such organs appear as a result of perfectly ordinary natural processes...”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p203
“...The most striking examples of ‘the contrivances of nature’ are to be found in the biological domain, and it is to these that [William] Paley devoted much of his attention. In biology the adaptation of means to ends is legendary. Consider the eye, for example. It is hard to imagine that this organ is not meant to provide the faculty of sight. Or that the wings of a bird aren’t there for the purpose of flight. To Paley and many others, such intricate and successful adaptation bespoke providential arrangement by an intelligent designer. Alas, we all know about the speedy demise of this argument. Darwin’s theory of evolution demonstrated decisively that complex organization efficiently adapted to the environment could arise as a result of random mutations and natural selection. No designer is needed to produce an eye or a wing. Such organs appear as a result of perfectly ordinary natural processes...”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p203
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“Another of [Michael] Behe’s favourite alleged examples of ‘irreducible complexity’ is the immune system. Let Judge Jones himself [of a Pennsylvania 2005 case trying to teach intelligent design in public schools] take up the story:
“‘In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, be simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not ‘good enough.’
“Behe, under cross-examination by Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs, was forced to admit that he hadn’t read most of those fifty-eight peer-reviewed papers. Hardly surprising, for immunology is hard work. Less forgivable is that Behe dismissed such research as ‘unfruitful.’ It certainly is unfruitful if your aim is to make propaganda among gullible laypeople and politicians, rather than to discover important truths about the real world. After listening to Behe, Rothschild eloquently summed up what every honest person in that courtroom must have felt:
“’Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system... It’s our defense against debilitating and fatal diseases. The scientists who wrote those books and articles toil in obscurity, without book royalties or speaking engagements. Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire intelligent design movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don’t bother.’”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p159-160
“...The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. Darwin himself said as much: ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.’ Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin’s time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.
“In any case, even though genuinely irreducible complexity would wreck Darwin’s theory if it were ever found, who is to say that it wouldn’t wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it already has wrecked the intelligent design theory, for, as I keep saying and will say again, however little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p151
“Admissions of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore unfortunate, to say the least, that the main strategy of creation propagandists is the negative one of seeking out gaps in scientific knowledge and claiming to fill them with ‘intelligent design’ by default. The following is hypothetical but entirely typical. A creationist speaking: ‘The elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel from is irreducibly complex. NO part of it would do any good at all until the whole was assembled. Bet you can’t think of a way in which the weasel frog’s elbow could have evolved by slow gradual degrees.’ If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, the creationist draws a default conclusion: ‘Right, then, the alternative theory, ‘intelligent design,’ wins by default.’ Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right. Needless to say, the argument is not applied the other way around. We are encouraged to leap to the default theory without even looking to see whether it fails in the very same particular as the theory it is alleged to replace. Intelligent design – ID – is grated a Get Out Of Jail Free card, a charmed immunity to the rigorous demands made of evolution.
“But my present point is that the creationist ply undermines the scientist’s natural – indeed necessary – rejoicing in (temporary) uncertainty. For purely political reasons, today’s scientist might hesitate before saying: ‘Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’m not a specialist in weasel frogs, I’ll have to go to the University Library and take a look. Might make an interesting project for a graduate student.’ The moment a scientist said something like that – and long before the student began the project – the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: ‘Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.’
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p152-153
“...The speedy resort to a dramatic proclamation of ‘irreducible complexity’ represents a failure of the imagination. Some biological organ, if not an eye then a bacterial flagellar motor or a biochemical pathway, is decreed without further argument to be irreducibly complex. No attempt is made to demonstrate irreducible complexity. Notwithstanding the cautionary tales of eyes, wings and many other things, each new candidate for the dubious accolade is assumed to the transparently, self-evidently irreducibly complex, its status asserted by fiat. But think about it. Since irreducible complexity is being deployed as an argument for design, it should no more be asserted by fiat than design itself. You might as well simply assert that the weasel frog (bombardier beetle, etc.) demonstrates design, without further argument or justification. That is no way to do science.
“The logic turns out to be no more convincing than this: ‘I [insert own name] am personally unable to think of any way in which [insert biological phenomenon] could have been built up step by step. Therefore it is irreducibly complex. That means it is designed.’ Put it like that, and you immediately see that it is vulnerable to some scientist coming along and finding an intermediate; or at least imagining a plausible intermediate. Even if no scientists do come up with an explanation, it is plain bad logic to assume that ’design’ will fare any better. The reasoning that underlies ‘intelligent design’ theory is lazy and defeatist – classic ‘God of the Gaps’ reasoning. I have previously dubbed it the Argument from Personal Incredulity.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p154-155
“Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work we find the sponge known as Venus’ Flower Basic (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: ‘When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus’ Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.’ The Watchtower authors [of a book, Life - How Did It Get Here?] lose no time in adding their own punchline: ‘But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely designer.’ No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of phenomena such as Euplectella’s skeleton is the central problem that any theory of life must solve. The greater the statistical improbability, the less plausible is the chance as a solution: that is what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance. They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms, and no sane biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must solve: the problem of how to escape from chance...
“...Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman’s Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman’s Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance...
“...Creationist ‘logic’ is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a solution of stunning elegance and power.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p144-147
“What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subjects of the creationist’s wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn’t understand the power of accumulation.
“In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor. The absurd notion that such complexity could spontaneously self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot of the cliff to the top in one bound. Evolution, by contrast, goes around the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit: easy!...
“Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their favour always assume that biological adaptation is a question of the jackpot or nothing. Another name for the ‘jackpot or nothing’ fallacy is ‘irreducible complexity’ (IC). Either the eye sees or it doesn’t. Either the wing flies or it doesn’t. There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply wrong. Such intermediates abound in practice – which is exactly what we should expect in theory... Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
“Darwin devoted an entire chapter of the Origin of the Species to ‘Difficulties on the theory of descent with modification,’ and it is fair to say that this brief chapter anticipated and disposed of every single one of the alleged difficulties that have since been proposed, right up to the present day. The most formidable difficulties are Darwin’s ‘organs of extreme perfection and complication,’ sometimes erroneously described as ‘irreducibly complex.’ Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: ‘To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.’ Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin’s fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin’s effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees....
“‘What is the use of halt an eye?’ and ‘What is the use of half a wing?’ are both instances of the argument from ‘irreducible complexity.’ A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment’s thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can’t see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable...
“...A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus ‘pinhole camera’ eye makes a real image, but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak – not the highest peak but a high one...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p147-150
“‘Irreducible complexity’ is not a new idea, but the phrase itself was invented by the creationist Michael Behe in 1996... His best approach to a good example (still a bad one) was the bacterial flagellar motor.“The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of nature. It drives the only known example, outside human technology, of a freely rotating axle. Wheels for big animals would, I suspect, be genuine examples of irreducible complexity, and this is probably why they don’t exist. How would the nerves and blood vessels get across the bearing? The flagellum is a thread-like propeller, with which the bacterium burrows its way through the water. I say ‘burrows’ rather than ‘swims’ because, on the bacterial scale of existence, a liquid such as water would not feel as a liquid feels to us. It would feel more like treacle, or jelly, or even sand, and the bacterium would seem to burrow or screw its way through the water rather than swim... It has a true, freely rotating axle which turns continuously inside a bearing, driven by a remarkable little molecular motor. At the molecular level, the motor uses essentially the same principle as muscle, but in free rotation rather than in intermittent contraction. It has been happily described as a tiny outboard motor (although by engineering standards – and unusually for a biological mechanism – it is a spectacularly inefficient one).
“Without a word of justification, explanation or amplification, Behe simply proclaims the bacterial flagellar motor to be irreducibly complex. Since he offers no argument in favour of his assertion, we may begin by suspecting a failure of his imagination. He further alleges that specialist biological literature has ignored the problem. The falsehood of this allegation was massively and (to Behe) embarrassingly documented in the court of Judge John E. Jones in Pennsylvania in 2005, where Behe was testifying as an expert witness on behalf of a group of creationists who had tried to impose ‘intelligent design’ creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school – a move of ’breathtaking inanity,’ to quote Judge Jones (phrase and man surely destined for lasting fame)...
“The key to demonstrating irreducible complexity is to show that none of the parts could have been useful on its own. They all needed to be in place before any of them could do any good (Behe’s favourite analogy is to a mousetrap). In fact, molecular biologists have no difficulty in finding parts functioning outside the whole, both for the flagellar motor and for Behe’s other alleged examples of irreducible complexity...
“In the case of the bacterial rotary engine, [Kenneth Miller of Brown University, who is Christian] calls our attention to a mechanism called the Type Three Secretory System or TTSS. The TTSS is not used for rotatory movement. It is one of several systems used by parasitic bacteria for pumping toxic substances through their cell walls to poison their host organism... Each molecule of secreted substance is a large protein with a definite, three-dimensional structure on the same scale as the TTSS’s own: more like a solid sculpture than a liquid. Each molecule is individually propelled through a carefully shaped mechanism, like an automated slot machine dispensing, say, toys or bottles, rather than a simple hole through which a substance might ‘flow.’ The goods-dispenser itself is made of a rather small number of protein molecules, each one comparable in size and complexity to the molecules being dispensed through it....
“The protein molecules that form the structure of the TTSS are very similar to components of the flagellar motor. To the evolutionist it is clear that TTSS components were commandeered for a new, but not wholly unrelated, function when the flagellar motor evolved. Given that the TTSS is tugging molecules through itself, it is not surprising that it uses a rudimentary version of the principle used by the flagellar motor, which tugs the molecules of the axle round and round. Evidently, crucial components of the flagellar motor were already in place and working before the flagellar motor evolved. Commandeering existing mechanisms is an obvious way in which an apparently irreducibly complex piece of apparatus could climb Mount Improbable.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p156-159
“Another of [Michael] Behe’s favourite alleged examples of ‘irreducible complexity’ is the immune system. Let Judge Jones himself [of a Pennsylvania 2005 case trying to teach intelligent design in public schools] take up the story:
“‘In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, be simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not ‘good enough.’
“Behe, under cross-examination by Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs, was forced to admit that he hadn’t read most of those fifty-eight peer-reviewed papers. Hardly surprising, for immunology is hard work. Less forgivable is that Behe dismissed such research as ‘unfruitful.’ It certainly is unfruitful if your aim is to make propaganda among gullible laypeople and politicians, rather than to discover important truths about the real world. After listening to Behe, Rothschild eloquently summed up what every honest person in that courtroom must have felt:
“’Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system... It’s our defense against debilitating and fatal diseases. The scientists who wrote those books and articles toil in obscurity, without book royalties or speaking engagements. Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire intelligent design movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don’t bother.’”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p159-160
“...The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. Darwin himself said as much: ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.’ Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin’s time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.
“In any case, even though genuinely irreducible complexity would wreck Darwin’s theory if it were ever found, who is to say that it wouldn’t wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it already has wrecked the intelligent design theory, for, as I keep saying and will say again, however little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p151
“Admissions of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore unfortunate, to say the least, that the main strategy of creation propagandists is the negative one of seeking out gaps in scientific knowledge and claiming to fill them with ‘intelligent design’ by default. The following is hypothetical but entirely typical. A creationist speaking: ‘The elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel from is irreducibly complex. NO part of it would do any good at all until the whole was assembled. Bet you can’t think of a way in which the weasel frog’s elbow could have evolved by slow gradual degrees.’ If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, the creationist draws a default conclusion: ‘Right, then, the alternative theory, ‘intelligent design,’ wins by default.’ Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right. Needless to say, the argument is not applied the other way around. We are encouraged to leap to the default theory without even looking to see whether it fails in the very same particular as the theory it is alleged to replace. Intelligent design – ID – is grated a Get Out Of Jail Free card, a charmed immunity to the rigorous demands made of evolution.
“But my present point is that the creationist ply undermines the scientist’s natural – indeed necessary – rejoicing in (temporary) uncertainty. For purely political reasons, today’s scientist might hesitate before saying: ‘Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’m not a specialist in weasel frogs, I’ll have to go to the University Library and take a look. Might make an interesting project for a graduate student.’ The moment a scientist said something like that – and long before the student began the project – the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: ‘Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.’
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p152-153
“...The speedy resort to a dramatic proclamation of ‘irreducible complexity’ represents a failure of the imagination. Some biological organ, if not an eye then a bacterial flagellar motor or a biochemical pathway, is decreed without further argument to be irreducibly complex. No attempt is made to demonstrate irreducible complexity. Notwithstanding the cautionary tales of eyes, wings and many other things, each new candidate for the dubious accolade is assumed to the transparently, self-evidently irreducibly complex, its status asserted by fiat. But think about it. Since irreducible complexity is being deployed as an argument for design, it should no more be asserted by fiat than design itself. You might as well simply assert that the weasel frog (bombardier beetle, etc.) demonstrates design, without further argument or justification. That is no way to do science.
“The logic turns out to be no more convincing than this: ‘I [insert own name] am personally unable to think of any way in which [insert biological phenomenon] could have been built up step by step. Therefore it is irreducibly complex. That means it is designed.’ Put it like that, and you immediately see that it is vulnerable to some scientist coming along and finding an intermediate; or at least imagining a plausible intermediate. Even if no scientists do come up with an explanation, it is plain bad logic to assume that ’design’ will fare any better. The reasoning that underlies ‘intelligent design’ theory is lazy and defeatist – classic ‘God of the Gaps’ reasoning. I have previously dubbed it the Argument from Personal Incredulity.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p154-155
“Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work we find the sponge known as Venus’ Flower Basic (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: ‘When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus’ Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.’ The Watchtower authors [of a book, Life - How Did It Get Here?] lose no time in adding their own punchline: ‘But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely designer.’ No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of phenomena such as Euplectella’s skeleton is the central problem that any theory of life must solve. The greater the statistical improbability, the less plausible is the chance as a solution: that is what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance. They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms, and no sane biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must solve: the problem of how to escape from chance...
“...Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman’s Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman’s Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance...
“...Creationist ‘logic’ is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a solution of stunning elegance and power.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p144-147
“What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subjects of the creationist’s wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn’t understand the power of accumulation.
“In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor. The absurd notion that such complexity could spontaneously self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot of the cliff to the top in one bound. Evolution, by contrast, goes around the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit: easy!...
“Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their favour always assume that biological adaptation is a question of the jackpot or nothing. Another name for the ‘jackpot or nothing’ fallacy is ‘irreducible complexity’ (IC). Either the eye sees or it doesn’t. Either the wing flies or it doesn’t. There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply wrong. Such intermediates abound in practice – which is exactly what we should expect in theory... Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
“Darwin devoted an entire chapter of the Origin of the Species to ‘Difficulties on the theory of descent with modification,’ and it is fair to say that this brief chapter anticipated and disposed of every single one of the alleged difficulties that have since been proposed, right up to the present day. The most formidable difficulties are Darwin’s ‘organs of extreme perfection and complication,’ sometimes erroneously described as ‘irreducibly complex.’ Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: ‘To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.’ Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin’s fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin’s effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees....
“‘What is the use of halt an eye?’ and ‘What is the use of half a wing?’ are both instances of the argument from ‘irreducible complexity.’ A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment’s thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can’t see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable...
“...A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus ‘pinhole camera’ eye makes a real image, but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak – not the highest peak but a high one...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p147-150
“‘Irreducible complexity’ is not a new idea, but the phrase itself was invented by the creationist Michael Behe in 1996... His best approach to a good example (still a bad one) was the bacterial flagellar motor.“The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of nature. It drives the only known example, outside human technology, of a freely rotating axle. Wheels for big animals would, I suspect, be genuine examples of irreducible complexity, and this is probably why they don’t exist. How would the nerves and blood vessels get across the bearing? The flagellum is a thread-like propeller, with which the bacterium burrows its way through the water. I say ‘burrows’ rather than ‘swims’ because, on the bacterial scale of existence, a liquid such as water would not feel as a liquid feels to us. It would feel more like treacle, or jelly, or even sand, and the bacterium would seem to burrow or screw its way through the water rather than swim... It has a true, freely rotating axle which turns continuously inside a bearing, driven by a remarkable little molecular motor. At the molecular level, the motor uses essentially the same principle as muscle, but in free rotation rather than in intermittent contraction. It has been happily described as a tiny outboard motor (although by engineering standards – and unusually for a biological mechanism – it is a spectacularly inefficient one).
“Without a word of justification, explanation or amplification, Behe simply proclaims the bacterial flagellar motor to be irreducibly complex. Since he offers no argument in favour of his assertion, we may begin by suspecting a failure of his imagination. He further alleges that specialist biological literature has ignored the problem. The falsehood of this allegation was massively and (to Behe) embarrassingly documented in the court of Judge John E. Jones in Pennsylvania in 2005, where Behe was testifying as an expert witness on behalf of a group of creationists who had tried to impose ‘intelligent design’ creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school – a move of ’breathtaking inanity,’ to quote Judge Jones (phrase and man surely destined for lasting fame)...
“The key to demonstrating irreducible complexity is to show that none of the parts could have been useful on its own. They all needed to be in place before any of them could do any good (Behe’s favourite analogy is to a mousetrap). In fact, molecular biologists have no difficulty in finding parts functioning outside the whole, both for the flagellar motor and for Behe’s other alleged examples of irreducible complexity...
“In the case of the bacterial rotary engine, [Kenneth Miller of Brown University, who is Christian] calls our attention to a mechanism called the Type Three Secretory System or TTSS. The TTSS is not used for rotatory movement. It is one of several systems used by parasitic bacteria for pumping toxic substances through their cell walls to poison their host organism... Each molecule of secreted substance is a large protein with a definite, three-dimensional structure on the same scale as the TTSS’s own: more like a solid sculpture than a liquid. Each molecule is individually propelled through a carefully shaped mechanism, like an automated slot machine dispensing, say, toys or bottles, rather than a simple hole through which a substance might ‘flow.’ The goods-dispenser itself is made of a rather small number of protein molecules, each one comparable in size and complexity to the molecules being dispensed through it....
“The protein molecules that form the structure of the TTSS are very similar to components of the flagellar motor. To the evolutionist it is clear that TTSS components were commandeered for a new, but not wholly unrelated, function when the flagellar motor evolved. Given that the TTSS is tugging molecules through itself, it is not surprising that it uses a rudimentary version of the principle used by the flagellar motor, which tugs the molecules of the axle round and round. Evidently, crucial components of the flagellar motor were already in place and working before the flagellar motor evolved. Commandeering existing mechanisms is an obvious way in which an apparently irreducibly complex piece of apparatus could climb Mount Improbable.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p156-159
Michael Ruse, Canadian philosopher of science, 1940-
“Irreducible complexity is supposedly something which could not have come through unbroken law (meaning law that has no special divine guidance), and especially not through the agency of natural selection. Critics claim that [Michael] Behe shows a misunderstanding of the very nature and workings of natural selection. No one is denying that in natural processes there may well be parts which, if removed, would lead at once to the non-functioning of the systems in which they occur. The point however is not whether the parts now in place could not be removed without collapse, but whether they could have been put in place by natural selection...
“...But Darwinian evolutionists have hardly ignored the matter of complex processes. Indeed, it is discussed in detail by Darwin in the Origin, where he refers to that most puzzling of all adaptations, the eye. At the biochemical level, today’s Darwinians have many examples of the most complex of processes that have been put in place by selection. Take that staple of the body’s biochemistry, the process where energy from food is converted into a form which can be used by the cells. Rightly does a standard textbook refer to this vital organic system, the so-called ‘Krebs cycle,’ as something which ‘undergoes a very complicated series of reactions’ (Hollum 1987, 408)...
“Yet the cycle did not come out of nowhere. It was cobbled together out of other cellular processes which do other things. It was a ‘bricolage’, that is to say it was something put together in a haphazard fashion. Each one of the bits and pieces of the cycle exists for other purposes and has been coopted for the new end. The scientists who have made this connection could not have made a stronger case against Behe’s irreducible complexity than if they had had him in mind from the first...
“What is the alternative strategy that Behe must take? Presumably that the designer is at work all of the time, producing mechanisms as and when needed. So, if we are lucky, we might expect to see some produced in our lifetime. Indeed, there must be a sense of disappointment among biologists that no such creative acts have so far been reported. More than this, as we turn from science towards theology, there even greater disappointments. Most obviously, what about bad mutations (in the sense of mutations that lead to consequences very non-helpful to their possessors)? If the designer is needed and available for complex engineering problems, why could not the designer take some time on the simple matters, specifically those simple matters which if unfixed lead to absolutely horrendous problems. Some of the worst genetic diseases are caused by one little alteration in one little part of the DNA. If the designer is able and willing to do the very complex because it is very good, why does it not do the very simple because the alternative is very bad? Behe speaks of this as being part of the problem of evil, which is true, but not very helpful. Given that the opportunity and ability to do good was so obvious and yet not taken, we need to know the reason why...”
— Michael Ruse, “Creationism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Sept 21, 2018
“Irreducible complexity is supposedly something which could not have come through unbroken law (meaning law that has no special divine guidance), and especially not through the agency of natural selection. Critics claim that [Michael] Behe shows a misunderstanding of the very nature and workings of natural selection. No one is denying that in natural processes there may well be parts which, if removed, would lead at once to the non-functioning of the systems in which they occur. The point however is not whether the parts now in place could not be removed without collapse, but whether they could have been put in place by natural selection...
“...But Darwinian evolutionists have hardly ignored the matter of complex processes. Indeed, it is discussed in detail by Darwin in the Origin, where he refers to that most puzzling of all adaptations, the eye. At the biochemical level, today’s Darwinians have many examples of the most complex of processes that have been put in place by selection. Take that staple of the body’s biochemistry, the process where energy from food is converted into a form which can be used by the cells. Rightly does a standard textbook refer to this vital organic system, the so-called ‘Krebs cycle,’ as something which ‘undergoes a very complicated series of reactions’ (Hollum 1987, 408)...
“Yet the cycle did not come out of nowhere. It was cobbled together out of other cellular processes which do other things. It was a ‘bricolage’, that is to say it was something put together in a haphazard fashion. Each one of the bits and pieces of the cycle exists for other purposes and has been coopted for the new end. The scientists who have made this connection could not have made a stronger case against Behe’s irreducible complexity than if they had had him in mind from the first...
“What is the alternative strategy that Behe must take? Presumably that the designer is at work all of the time, producing mechanisms as and when needed. So, if we are lucky, we might expect to see some produced in our lifetime. Indeed, there must be a sense of disappointment among biologists that no such creative acts have so far been reported. More than this, as we turn from science towards theology, there even greater disappointments. Most obviously, what about bad mutations (in the sense of mutations that lead to consequences very non-helpful to their possessors)? If the designer is needed and available for complex engineering problems, why could not the designer take some time on the simple matters, specifically those simple matters which if unfixed lead to absolutely horrendous problems. Some of the worst genetic diseases are caused by one little alteration in one little part of the DNA. If the designer is able and willing to do the very complex because it is very good, why does it not do the very simple because the alternative is very bad? Behe speaks of this as being part of the problem of evil, which is true, but not very helpful. Given that the opportunity and ability to do good was so obvious and yet not taken, we need to know the reason why...”
— Michael Ruse, “Creationism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Sept 21, 2018