Reducibly Complex

Happy 200th birthday to Dr. Charles Darwin. Later this year (in November) we will also be saying happy 150th anniversary to the release of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Indeed today, Darwin Day, is a special day.

Today is also the celebration of the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States and a person largely responsible for the ending of slavery in the U.S. in the 1860’s. Kudos on this day go to you, too, Abe.

(Note: Today is the “celebration” of Academic Freedom day by proponents of Intelligent Design. Lets just say for now that Academic Freedom is being misused and misinterpreted by the ID crowd. I’ll have a post about that soon, but we’ll let it go for now).

This is Part 9 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #9.

STATEMENT: ”A living cell is so awesomely complex that its interdependent components stagger the imagination and defy evolutionary explanations.”

RESPONSE: The first thing to say about this statement is that it is a great example of the logical fallacy “Argument from Personal Incredulity.” While a living cell is awesomely complex, that complexity does not “stagger” my mind, nor most biologists. If it truly staggered the mind, we would not be able to comprehend its complexity in a meaningful way, or dissect and understand the many parts of its complexity. Just because it staggers your mind doesn’t make its complexity “created” by God.

The second thing is that the interdependent components do not defy evolutionary explanations. In fact, they ARE the evolutionary explanations. The complexity of a living cell developed over billions of years. Let’s not forget that it took approximately 3 billion years of evolution before there were even multi-cellular organisms. What do you think was happening in those 3 billion years? The answer is that what constituted life and eventually evolved into multicellular organisms was developing greater and greater complexity as time passed. If it were not for this complexity, multi-cellular life would never have developed.

This strikes me as being a very similar argument as the intelligent design argument of “Irreducible Complexity,” from which the name of this blog is derived (as an antonym of sorts). I will here only state that irreducible complexity is a very poor argument for intelligent design or creationism (one in the same, in my mind). For more information on irreducible complexity and why it is not a valid scientific theory, I suggest reading the About R.C. page of this blog, the Wikipedia page on irreducible complexity (particularly the Response of the Scientific Community section), or Ken Miller’s “The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity’”.

STATEMENT: “A minimal cell contains over 60,000 proteins of 100 different configurations.”

RESPONSE: This appears to be a true statement, though I was unable to conclusively verify it within a few minutes of searching through Google. Nevertheless, 60,000 proteins in 100 different configurations is not staggeringly complex and certainly does not “defy evolutionary explanations,” as noted above.

STATEMENT: “The chance of this assemblage occurring by chance is 1 in 10 4,478,296 .”

RESPONSE: At the time of this writing, that is the exact way it is written in the “Evidence for Creation” article on creationevidence.org. This was a simple copy and paste; the poor grammar and typos are not produced by me.

I will assume that 1 in 10 4,478,296 is actually 1 in 10^4,478,296 (one in ten to the power of four million four hundred and seventy-eight thousand two hundred and ninety-six), a truly impressive number.

I don’t know why I bothered to fix that typo or spell out the number so that people might understand what is actually being argued because the number, while truly impressive, is irrelevant. In fact, the entire statement is irrelevant because evolutionary theory does not state that this assemblage occurs “by chance.” Rather, “Chance certainly plays a large part in evolution, but this argument completely ignores the fundamental role of natural selection, and selection is the very opposite of chance. Chance, in the form of mutations, provides genetic variation, which is the raw material that natural selection has to work with. From there, natural selection sorts out certain variations. Those variations which give greater reproductive success to their possessors (and chance ensures that such beneficial mutations will be inevitable) are retained, and less successful variations are weeded out. When the environment changes, or when organisms move to a different environment, different variations are selected, leading eventually to different species. Harmful mutations usually die out quickly, so they don’t interfere with the process of beneficial mutations accumulating” (Mark Isaak, “Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution”).

CONCLUSION: This entire argument is based on a completely ignorant point of view. If evolutionary theory taught that the evolution of life happens by chance, then the creationists would have a very valid point. But it doesn’t, so they don’t. But the ignorance is spelled out in the first sentence of this argument: “staggers the mind.” It doesn’t stagger the mind. Life’s complexity is impressive, and the complexity is awesome; but we can wrap our heads around it, study it, learn life’s inner workings, and decipher exactly how it is that life, and all the organisms that represent it, exists, lives, survives, dies, genetically mutates, etc. and determine how we got here.

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Robert Crowther has posted on EvolutionNews.org a very brief blog about intelligent design titled “By Chance or by Design?” that is the worst argument against evolution I’ve ever seen.

A little back story here. Intelligent design proponents argue that life could not have sprung into being “by chance.” As evidence of this, they often use an anecdote first proposed by Fred Hoyle that states:

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing-747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?

Completely missing the point of evolution, creationists and ID proponents use this as evidence that evolution could not have happened. In a sense, they are arguing that the complexity of life (the number of individual components to every living being) could not have assembled themselves by chance, but that they must have been guided by an intelligent designer.

They are, of course, way off the mark. The complexity of life is the direct result of natural selection, which has absolutely nothing to do with chance.

Back to Crowther. His blog is titled “By Chance or by Design?” and simply states “You decide.” There is then the following YouTube video showing many parts of a Honda Accord arranged in a sort of Rube Goldberg machine with the end result being a completely assembled Honda Accord.

My question to Mr. Crowther is this: How in ANY WAY does this show that life is the result of an intelligent designer? All this shows is that Honda has built a car with many different car parts, all of which were intelligently designed…BY HUMANS!

Nobody claims that cars or Boeing-747s come into being randomly by chance. Seriously, the level of ignorance here is incredible.

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“I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.”

-William James

Anything is possible in science, but the degree to which a hypothesis is accepted or denied is directly proportional to the amount of evidence in support of it or detracting from it, as well as to the amount of evidence supporting or detracting from an alternate hypothesis. Creation science and intelligent design are not impossible hypotheses, but the evidence supporting them is lacking, and the evidence supporting an alternate hypothesis (i.e. evolution) is overwhelming.

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(the views expressed by our sponsors are property of the individual sponsor alone, and do not reflect the opinion of ReduciblyComplex.com)

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(the views expressed by our sponsors are property of the individual sponsor alone, and do not reflect the opinion of ReduciblyComplex.com)

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.

–Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Ironic that Darwin, of all people, should have stated this. We are now nearly 150 years on from the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution in The Origin of Species. But despite this, the false views, supported only by false evidence, presented by proponents of Intelligent Design continue to do injury to science. However, the harm is great, as our young students continue to be caught in the middle where they suffer the consequences of religion…again. To starve them of the education that they and we are worthy of is a sin of the most unholy kind. I only hope that as time goes on the road to truth does, in fact, open up to the minds of all people.

A recent article on EvolutionNews.org (a very deceptive name considering that Evolution News is part of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute) claims that “We [the Discovery Institute] are NOT seeking to have intelligent design included in textbooks or in classroom instruction. We only want factual errors corrected and legitimate scientific weaknesses of neo-Darwinism presented.” Essentially, this statement sums up the newest version of the Intelligent Design movement; it is the “teach the controversy” statement. The argument is that we should be teaching kids the controversy that exists in the scientific community regarding evolution. In other words, lets teach kids evolutionary theory and how it works, but also teach them that some scientists disagree with evolutionary theory. Let’s teach kids the strengths and weaknesses of evolution and let them decide for themselves if it is valid or not.

Although it sounds reasonable to teach evolutionary biology in this way, there are problems with this approach. First and foremost, science is not democratic. You can teach the strengths and weaknesses of a particular theory, but “deciding” if it is valid or not is not how science works. The reason that the scientific community accepts evolution is not because they “decided” that it was valid, but because the theory stands up. The evidence for evolution is VERY strong; the weaknesses of evolution are few and far between. Evolution is supported by paleontology, biology, geology, genetics, and a host of other sciences. It is the mountain of evidence supporting evolution that validates its claims. In fact, if there were ever an opportunity for evolution to be knocked down, the biggest one would have been genetics. If genetics somehow showed that heredity is non-favorable (that is to say, did not support natural selection), then evolution would have been toast. This, however, did not happen. Genetics, in profound and enormous ways, confirmed at its discover and continues today to confirm evolution.

This approach of “lets teach kids the strengths and weaknesses” is code for what they call “teach the controversy.” In other words, lets teach kids that there is a controversy in the scientific community over whether or not evolution is valid. Then these informed students will be able to make up their own minds. The trouble with this, however, is that there is no controversy in the scientific community regarding the validity of evolutionary theory. To say to students that there is a controversy over whether or not evolution is real would be to flat out lie to them. There are mountains of evidence that support evolutionary theory, and there isn’t even a mole-hill of evidence that opposes it.

I am not going to dive much deeper into this topic because I feel that what I’ve already stated above is more than enough to show that anti-evolution is simply wrong; however, I will add just one more point. The article posits: “Darwinists are fond of trying to change the subject from teaching the case for and against Darwinian evolution, and make this a debate over whether or not to include intelligent design in the curriculum. That isn’t the issue.” That is the issue, though. In science, when a particular theory or paradigm is called into question, particularly one that is considered true by the scientific community, it is not simply enough to say that the theory is wrong; one must also posit a hypothesis as to WHY the theory is wrong. If we are simply saying that evolution is wrong, we must provide a reason as to why it is wrong and, from that reasoning, propose a new theory to be tested and scrutinized through the established scientific method by the scientific community. Through careful testing and unbiased examination of the results we may establish evidence for or against the new hypothesis. For this new hypothesis to truly be valid, particularly so much as to dismantle the existing theory (in this case, evolution), the evidence must be both valid and quantifiable to the degree of displacing doubt about the hypothesis’ validity while also creating doubt of the current hypothesis, theory, or paradigm. If we are to call into question the validity of evolution, what is to be the valid, quantifiable evidence that creates doubt of that validity? That is why intelligent design is included in the discussion.

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What does “Reducibly Complex” stand for?

Reducibly Complex is based on the argument of Irreducible Complexity that comes from intelligent design proponents. Simply put, irreducible complexity states that many organisms or organic structures are so complex that they could not possibly have evolved through natural selection, but instead must have been “designed” by an intelligent agent. For example, there are many intricately connected components to the human eye, so many so that to take away one component would render the eye useless and thus all of the components would have to have been developed at the same time, rather than evolving slowly over millions of years (as evolution predicts). However, the argument falls apart when one looks at the eye’s function when one of these components is taken away; contrary to irreducible complexity, the eye can still function, though to a diminished degree, even if one or several of its components are removed. This is only one of many examples; the notion of irreducible complexity is falsifiable and is thus wrong.

As I am a human, the result of billions of years of evolution, I am a wonderfully complex organism. Nevertheless, my complexity is reducible, as many excellent scholars have shown.

Thus, I am Reducibly Complex.