[RougeUnderoos]

Originally Posted by FlamesFanInEdm

I would like to know your response to Michael Behe, who in his book, Darwin's Black Box, uses biochemical evidence, particularily irreducible complexity, as proof against evolution.

Here is a brief intro to irreducible complexity.

A mousetrap has a clear function (crushing mice) and is made of several parts (a platform, a spring, a bar that does the crushing). If any of these parts is removed, the trap doesn’t work. Hence it’s irreducibly complex.

Here is one response shamelessly stolen from wikipedia...

Perhaps most importantly, potentially viable evolutionary pathways have been proposed for allegedly irreducibly complex systems such as blood clotting, the immune system[3] and the flagellum,[4] which were the three examples Behe used. Even his example of a mousetrap was shown to be reducible by John H. McDonald.[5] If irreducible complexity is an insurmountable obstacle to evolution, it should not be possible to conceive of such pathways—Behe has remarked that such plausible pathways would defeat his argument.
Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin have shown that systems satisfying Behe's characterization of irreducible biochemical complexity can arise naturally and spontaneously as the result of self-organizing chemical processes.[6]evolved biochemical process. They claim that Behe overestimated the significance of irreducible complexity because his simple, linear view of biochemical reactions results in his taking snapshots of selective features of biological systems, structures and processes, while ignoring the redundant complexity of the context in which those features are naturally embedded and an overreliance of overly simplistic metaphors such as his mousetrap. In addition, it has been claimed that computer simulations of evolution demonstrate that it is possible for irreducible complexity to evolve naturally. They also assert that what evolved biochemical and molecular systems actually exhibit is redundant complexity—a kind of complexity that is the product of an [7]



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity


Later it goes on to shoot down the mousetrap thing by comparing it to a cat that also kills mice. The cat can keep killing mice even if you crop it's tail, removes it's claws, it loses an eye, et cetera. In other words, you can remove parts of the system and it can continue to function, so it's not irreducibly complex.


I'm no science-talking guy, but it seems that this "irreducible complexity" stuff has been fairly convincingly shot down.