Irreducible Complexity

This term, made famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective in this controversy) by Michael Behe and his book Darwin's Black Box, refers to the complex processes and structures within organisms, especially at the subcellular level, that cannot have come about in piecemeal or stepwise fashion. They must have manifested as a complete entity in order to provide the functions they perform.

A common analogy or illustration drawn at this point is that of the mousetrap--not one of those fancy "live-catch" gizmos, but the plain, ordinary wooden slat with the Tripwire of Death that has frequently threatened my fingers when attempting to set one. In order for a mousetrap to trap (and kill) mice, all of its various components must be in place and working properly. A mousetrap missing the spring, or the baitholder, or the tripwire hook, simply will not catch a mouse.

The problem this--irreducible complexity, not inept mousetraps--entails for Darwin's theory is that he had no concept of the inherent sophistication of intracellular systems. In his day, the cell was conceived of as a simple bag of biochemicals. We now appreciate to a much greater degree that a cell contains a highly structured, intricate, and complicated series of interdependent processes and multifacted structures. But can such sophistication be acquired, however slowly, one step at a time? A properly functioning machine requires the simultaneous presence of all its components. A lawnmower without wheels or a cutting blade doesn't cut grass very well, if at all. But if complexity is not achievable one step at a time, Darwin's theory is untenable. Darwinism insists on the stepwise, gradual, random (but conserving) process of natural selection to "build" complexity and diversity. There's the problem--if some biological entities must be in place fully formed, how do they come about by natural selection?

Advocates ("boosters," if you will) of Darwinism and Darwinian education like to trumpet their slogan that evolution is the foundation of all modern biology. Well, there is hardly anything more modern in biology than molecular biology, and textbooks on that subject routinely ignore macroevolution after giving initial lip service to the concept (usually in the preface or some such extraneous portion of the book--it's sort of like the outwardly-observant religious person saying a quick grace right away to get to the main point of eating his meal). Their authors then proceed merrily to lay out for their readers the wonderously complex and elegant world of the cell.

Scientists like to insist that they must be free to follow the evidence wherever it leads. But if that evidence suggests the influence of intelligence in the development of biological organisms, the tenacity of prior philosophical commitments to materialistic naturalism force the dismissal of such possibilities immediately. Harvard's Richard Lewontin has informed us (emphasis mine):

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who would believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Dear me. God forbid.