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Irreducible Complexity
Design
Michael Behe is a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University famously wrote the book
“Darwin’s Black Box. He coined the term Irreducible Complexity for the concept that has
been in use for a century. This means reducing something to the simplest possible form
before it stops working. His example has been a mousetrap. It needs a spring, the
entrapment bar, a trigger and some bait. If any one part is missing or doesn’t work the
entire mousetrap doesn’t work at all. In a minute We shall extend the principle by using
the push bike as a different example, but first, let’s consider what Richard Dawkins the
evolutionary advocate had to say.
Richard Dawkins agrees that life and things in Biology “look like they were designed but they
weren’t designed”. His proof? ‘Darwins’ theory of evolution doesn’t allow design, so it can’t
have been designed. But hand on here, the theory the moon is made from cheese doesn’t
provide proof that the moon is made from cheese. So, we’ll leave you the reader to
consider both suggestions while we look at the process of design
Designed?
The bike in-of-itself is complex, but as we can see it is not good enough to have any old setof wheels. To make a working pushbike, you need the right sort of wheels. The wheel is anirreducible complex sub-system within the bike; to work the wheel has to have a wheel rim.The tyres have to be the right size, the wheel has to have spokes. To assemble the wheelyou need to correct number of spokes and these have to be the right length, they have aspecial hoot on one end and a special nut at the other end. You get the picture; we couldcontinue forever looking at each detail of every part. The conclusion is that all the partshave to be designed and have to fit. The maker of bicycle tyres has to work to aspecification, if 27” diameter wheels are standard size there is no point making a 27 ½ inchdiameter tyre ! A design goes beyond the “wished for” end result and requires specificationsand detailed descriptions of every part.
____________When we look at biological systems, which are far more complex, we discover the same.Every part in our body has to work with the other parts. Every part we examine hassubsystems and all of those have to be planned in advance to work with each other. No onewould accept that a tyre factory would come up with the exact tyre required for a racingbike if they did not know in advance what sizes were needed. No one would buy a bikemissing its wheels just because the shop said that they hadn’t yet figured out how to makethem because we all know that the bike will not work if bits are missing.So why buy a theory that doesn’t work, has missing parts which is without evidnce.
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