Posted by OneGlove [OneGlove] on November 27, 1999 at 13:59:45 {nwG7wj0NI.4DjahjRee6VOGhhkwG5g}:
In Reply to: Irreducible Complexity posted by Snowball on November 26, 1999 at 20:00:00:
Behe is a respectable bio-chemist. I have no knowledge at all of bio-chemistry, but I have heard opponents describe his pre-bestselling author work as good.
Unfortunately this has not protected him from stupid ideas.
He claims not to be a creationist, but says that some organisms were designed. Right away you should guess that his logic motor might not be functioning at full throttle.
"By irreducibly complex I mean a single
system composed of several well-matched,
interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes
the system to effectively cease functioning. An
irreducibly complex system cannot be produced
directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial
function, which continues to work by the same
mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a
precursor system, because any precursor to an
irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by
definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex
biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a
powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution." (p. 39)
This is from Behe's book Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. (I got the quote from the link at the bottom of the page.)
There is one glaring problem with Behe's logic. He assumes that this irreducibly complex system always had the same function. Evolutionarily speaking, that is almost never true. (You probably couldn't hear if someone removed any one of your ear bones. But in our reptile ancestors those same bones used to be the jaw.)
Behe goes on to point out several things which he says could not have evolved. This is hardly convincing. For example, if you said you had no idea how gray moths could evolve into black moths, it would hardly be a convincing argument that they did not. Creationists in Darwin's time said that there was no way that evolution could explain how the eye evolved. Darwin explained in detail just how it could - and did - evolve dozens of times in seperate lineages. So creationists switched to a different organ. Which was then explained by evolutionists. So creationists switched again...ad naseum.
So when Behe picks a topic from the forefront of evolutionary thought and says we cannot explain it, the rest of us should take that with a grain of salt. (Especially since he often ignores previously published research.) It might be true that evolutionists can't explain it. Yet.
--OneGlove