>I never really thought about it before, and I have
>not read Mike Behe's book (Darwin's Black Box), but when
>Behe describes his concept of "irreducible complexity"
>is he using "complexity" in the colloquial or the technical
>sense? If it is the colloquial sense, this probably muddies
>the waters more than it clears them. Can you answer this?
>
I read Darwin's Black Box, and Mike's definition of irreducible complexity
looked quite colloquial to me.
Mike's baseline example of irreducible complexity was a mousetrap. The
salient point of his definition was that you had to have all the components
in place for the assembly to function. The implication was that such a
mechanism couldn't have evolved. While Mike makes some interesting points,
I don't think the mousetrap example serves his purpoase very well. You can
make a good case that modern mousetraps "evolved" from the deadfalls that
have been in use since prehistoric times. Someone saw an animal crushed
under a fallen tree and had the bright idea that he could make such an
"accident" happen again and use it to feed his family. He propped up a log
and perhaps manually pulled the prop (with say a rope made from a vine)
when his quarry walked under it. Eventually someone got the idea of
baiting the trap -- so the hunter didn't have to watch it constantly. Over
time someone else got the idea that the trap could be made with a base and
become portable, and someone got the idea that you could substitute a
spring for gravity. Now the ID advocates are going to be all over me
because they are going to say that that's not evolution, but intelligent
design. But that's because we know that men designed traps, learning from
the traps their ancestors and colleagues had designed. In the case of
objects in nature we can't directly observe the operation of intelligence
on successive biological designs -- only the results. But that does not
establish that such intelligence is not in operation.
Bill Hamilton
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William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
Staff Research Engineer
Chassis and Vehicle Systems, GM R&D Center
Warren, MI
hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com / whamilto@mich.com (home)