How Does Irreducible Complexity Get Its Charm Since It Has No Basis in Science?
talkdesign.org
"Evolution is cleverer than you are."
-biologists' proverb
Evolution doesn't even notice whether a combination of parts, system and function chosen by an observer happens to satisfy a definition in a book. It just doesn't matter. This is in a nutshell what scientists have been saying since Darwin's Black Box was published ( 44). Yet the book has been very influential with the public (see for instance the 370 or so reviews at amazon.com ( 45)). And it provides the one seemingly scientific reason to teach ID in public school science classes.
How can the book's success with laymen be explained? First, it appears that evolution is hardly taught in the US. Basic knowledge such as the four modes of evolutionary change given at the beginning of this essay would show a reader that evolution is much too flexible for IC to be an issue. Biological basics and careful reading would enable one to see that Behe's theoretical argument that IC can't evolve is unsound.
Without a good basic understanding of biology, a tricky ambiguity sets in.
First, there is the definition of IC. Then comes the apparent proof that it cannot evolve. After that, 'unevolvable' is casually used as the meaning of IC. To complete the picture, the subtext all along is that IC is impressively complicated. Thus one's attention is directed away from simple cases which directly show how basic modes of evolutionary change may lead to IC. The definition is used to argue that IC exists, and the other two meanings seal the conviction that IC systems are very unnatural indeed. It is a case of using words which seem to mean what some people want them to mean, but on closer examination don't. This results in the reader losing sight of the fact that none of Behe's examples are in fact IC in biochemical terms, and of the fact that IC doesn't matter for evolution in any case, so that there actually is no 'biochemical challenge to evolution' at all.
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