Molecular Leitmotif
A Creationist commenter on the Unicorn Museum website regurgitated a huge section of an old Michael Behe article. For those “not in the know”, Behe is an intelligent design proponent from the Discovery Institute who coined the principle of “irreducible complexity”. In a nutshell, irreducible complexity means that if some biological structure or function seems so complex that the observed cannot think of a way to explain the entire evolutionary process in detail, then the answer automatically is “God did it”. Although this is a clear example of Argumentum ad Ignorantiam, it still remains a powerful argument aimed to win over laymen to the evolution deniers camp.
In the article Behe wrote:
Each of the anatomical steps and structures [with regards to vision] that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric. Darwin’s simple steps are now revealed to be huge leaps between carefully tailored machines. Thus biochemistry offers a Lilliputian challenge to Darwin. Now the black box of the cell has been opened and a Lilliputian world of staggering complexity stands revealed. It must be explained.
This argument makes two false assumptions: first, that the entire biochemical cascade evolved as is, and second, that all the proteins involved evolved dependently of each other. This is far removed from the biological reality: life uses, re-uses, recycles and remixes common “motifs”! Therefore, the proteins and their functional subsections called domains, in the vision pathway and in other complex pathways, can evolve independently of all the other proteins.
I will address this failure in logic once I have more time. For now, a good break-down of the fallacies in Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box can be found at the wonderful Talk Origins website.