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Irreducible Complexity

Mike Behe’s son becomes “young humanist”, says father has no religious agenda

Here. Ryan Schaffer interviews Leo Behe, who hopes to study philosophy in the fall term: I’m going to a university this fall to study philosophy. In the future, I hope to write on the subject of religion and why I believe it is both harmful and false. – (“The Humanist Interview: The son of intelligent design heavyweight Michael Behe discusses his journey to atheism” The Humanist, September/October 2011) That said, he does not claim that his father forced religion on him. Rather, I would like everyone to realize that he doesn’t have any sort of religious agenda and he’s not trying to denigrate science in any way. And so … Long-held beliefs, especially beliefs developed during childhood, operate on a Read More ›

Infinite Probabilistic Resources Makes ID Detection Easier (Part 2)

Previously [1], I argued that not only may a universe with infinite probabilistic resources undermine ID, it will definitely undermines science. Science operates by fitting models to data using statistical hypothesis testing with an assumption of regularity between the past, present, and future. However, given the possible permutations of physical histories, the majority are mostly random. Thus, a priori, the most rational position is that all detection of order cannot imply anything beyond the bare detection, and most certainly implies nothing about continued order in the future or that order existed in the past.

Furthermore, since such detections of order encompass any observations we may make, we have no other means of determining a posteriori whether science’s assumption of regularity is valid to any degree whatsoever. And, as the probabilistic resources increase the problem only gets worse. This is the mathematical basis for Hume’s problem of induction. Fortunately, ID provides a way out of this conundrum. Read More ›

Bradley Monton: Behe’s irreducible complexity is not a “God of the gaps” argument

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), observes, First, despite how it’s typically portrayed in the anti-intelligent design literature, I maintain that Behe’s irreducible complexity argument is not a God-of-the-gaps argument at all. Behe is not saying that we don’t know (or can’t know) how irreducibly complex systems like the bacterial flagellum could plausibly arise naturalistically. Instead, Behe is giving positive reasons that the sequence of events that would have to happen for irreducibly complex systems like the bacterial flagellum to arise via an undesigned process is an improbable sequence, and hence the design hypothesis should be taken seriously. p. 115. Anyway, do people other than Christian Darwinists use the expression Read More ›

An information systems prof has some questions about Ken Miller’s “spitball” mousetrap

Thumbnail for version as of 14:41, 25 May 2009
courtesy Captain Phoebus

While explaining how he believes complex biochemical information just happen to arise through random processes, Brown University’s Ken Miller dismisses Mike Behe’s mousetrap, introduced in Darwin’s Black Box. To show that it is not an example of irreducible complexity that points to design, he recounts a childhood recollection of a pupil using a mousetap to fire spitballs, which showed that the mousetrap could be used for something other than killing mice (pp 54-57). That is how Miller, who has just won the Stephen Jay Gould award for promoting Darwinism,  knew that ID biochemist Behe was wrong.

Ralph David Westall, an IS prof at California Polytechnic University, Pomona*, contacted Uncommon Descent to say, Read More ›

Coffee!!: World’s most complex Rube Goldberg machine …

Thumbnail for version as of 18:25, 4 January 2006… here (MSNBC, April 27, 2011):

This record-smashing Rube Goldberg developed by engineering students at Purdue University takes you on a journey from the big bang to the apocalypse in 244 easy steps — culminating in … [what did you expect?]

Fans of Mike Behe will recall his use of the concept in Darwin’s Black Box:

Now let’s talk about a different biochemical system of blood clotting. Amusingly, the way in which the blood clotting system works is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine. Read More ›

Michael Behe on the most recent Richard Lenski “evolvability” paper

Here: In my own view, the most interesting aspect of the recent Lenski paper is its highlighting of the pitfalls that Darwinian evolution must dance around, even as it is making an organism somewhat more fit. (1) If the “wrong” advantageous mutation in topoisomerase had become fixed in the population (by perhaps being slightly more advantageous or more common), then the “better” selective pathway would have been shut off completely. And since this phenomenon occurred in the first instance where anyone had looked for it, it is likely to be commonplace. That should not be surprising to anyone who thinks about the topic dispassionately. As the authors note, “Similar cases are expected in any population of asexual organisms that evolve Read More ›

Johnny Cash on Irreducible Complexity and Evolution

I posted this over a year ago. For those who missed it, enjoy.

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Yes, Johnny cash has written a song on evolution and irreducible complexity. It’s called “One Piece at a Time”:

Question: Is Darwinian evolution more or less effective than Cash’s mode of evolution?

YouTube Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1-zzJnKtDg

Here are the lyrics (thanks to my student Michael Stewart for pointing out this gem): Read More ›

Natural Scaffolding Discovered

Formation of “irreducibly complex systems” via purported scaffolding has been an ongoing debate amongst evolution and intelligent design theorists. Now a natural scaffolding has been discovered – and it may itself be part of another “irreducibly complex system”.

Sharma et al., discovered that natural fat works as a biological scaffold for “cells to grow and mature”. Then fascinatingly, “when the cells have matured into the desired tissue, they secrete another substance that breaks down and destroys the scaffold.”

Could the formation of this natural biological scaffold AND its subsequent removal form an irreducibly complex system? E.g. is such scaffolding essential or necessary to achieve a minimum growth rate? Could the secretion removing the scaffolding also be essential to trim function rather than being “bloated”? I expect this fat scaffolding/removal system will be found to be another irreducibly complex system which very efficiently reuses its materials.

See: Body fat may help us heal Read More ›

Applied Intelligent Design, Part 1

This is the first of probably three posts on applied Intelligent Design. This is not an extensive list of applications of ID concepts, but I thought that giving people examples of how ID can be not only interesting and informative but actually useful in solving both biological and engineering problems.
Read More ›

How were RNA gene repeats, “essential” to DNA repair, formed?

RNA replications have now been discovered to be “essential” to DNA error correction systems. If they are “essential”, how could they arrive by random mutation and “selection”? On what basis does neoDarwinism predict error correction in the first place?

From Intelligent Design, methodology one expects to see evidence of design in complex biochemical systems. From engineering design, I posit a foundational ID principle to be:
“Design systems to protect their design” Read More ›

A blow-by-blow response to Dr. Denis Alexander

In the last year and a bit I’ve done a lot of work in trying to understand and then critique the approach of Dr. Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute in Cambridge (UK). I know that many readers of UD are familiar with Alexander’s big-selling work, “Creation or Evolution – Do We Have To Choose?”. This book is probably (alongside Francis Collins) the work with the most traction by Darwinists seeking to argue from a Biblical Christian viewpoint. I’ve previously drawn attention to IVP’s “Should Christians Embrace Evolution”. In this post I want instead to draw attention to my own response, “Creation or Evolution – Why We Must Choose”. If you don’t want to read the blurb and just want Read More ›

DNA Preservation discovery wins Nobel prize

Were one to design the encoded DNA “blueprint” of life, would not one incorporate ways to preserve that “blueprint”? The Nobel prize in medicine has just been awarded for discovery of features that look amazingly like design to preserve chromosomes. See:

3 Americans win medicine Nobel for chromosome research

Three U.S. researchers were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on how chromosomes are protected against degradation, the Nobel Foundation reported Monday. Read More ›

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Turing machines, cells and why both are designed

In a previous post (see here) I wrote: “necessary but not sufficient condition for a self-reproducing automaton is to be a computer”. Biological cells self-reproduce then for this reason work as computers. But “computer” is a very generic term (it means a device able to compute, calculate, process information, rules and instructions). Computer-science studies a series of models, of increasing complexity, which deserve the name of “computer”. It may be interesting to briefly analyze these models and discover which of them cells are more similar to. At the same time I hope my analysis will clear more what said in that post. Read More ›