Reducibly Complex

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.

Please visit our advertisers!

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

Isaac Asimov was born on this day in 1920. Asimov was an American author and biochemist, who was a prolific writer of science fiction and of science books for the layperson. Born in Petrovichi, Russia, he emigrated with his family to New York City at age three. He entered Columbia University at the age of 15 and at 18 sold his first story to Amazing Stories. After earning a Ph.D., he taught biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine after 1949. By 18 Mar 1941, at the age of 21, Asimov had already written 31 stories, sold 17, and 14 had been published. As an author, lecturer, and broadcaster of astonishing range, he is most admired as a popularizer of science (The Collapsing Universe; 1977) and a science fiction writer (I, Robot;1950).

I am currently reading Darwin’s On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but Asimov is one of the authors that I feel I have to read next.

On this day in 1896, German scientist, Wilhelm Röntgen announced his discovery of x-rays. He sent copies of his manuscript and some of his x-ray photographs to several renowned physicists and friends, including Lord Kelvin in Glasgow and Henre Poincare in Paris. Four days later, on 5 Jan 1896, Die Presse published the news in a front-page article which described the discovery and suggested new methods of medical diagnoses might be made with this new kind of radiation. One day later, theLondon Standard cabled the news to other countries around the world about the “a light which for the purpose of photography will penetrate wood, flesh, cloth, and most other organic substances.” It printed the first English-language account the next day.

Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays was one of the truly popular scientific discoveries. Because of the availability of the simplicity of the parts he used to create these and the pictures he took using them, people from all over were able to go to hardware stores and for a not-unreasonable amount of money purchase everything they needed to be able to take their own x-ray photos. There is a story of a man whose wife broke her arm, so he subjected her to an x-ray photo session. After exposing her arm to x-rays for 12 hours, he sent his pictures to a doctor to ask for a diagnosis. The next day, he sent another letter asking how he should treat what looked like severe burns on his wife’s arm.

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

-Carl Sagan, deceased this day in 1996. Carl Sagan was an astronomer, exobiologist, and writer of popular science books. Sagan was also a skeptic, and his studies were far-ranging.

It is truly sad to me that I was not as enthused by science in my younger years. A person like Carl Sagan could have had a profound effect on my life. Now that I am enthused by science, Sagan does effect my life…he was truly a great person, scientist, and skeptic. I guess it is just one of those things, where I rather wish I could have had the chance to meet him.

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.

Please visit our advertisers!

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

I wanted to clear something up before it becomes a potential issue:

I am an atheist. I am a skeptic. But I do NOT think that the two go hand in hand. I have a fair amount of this page dedicated to religion. While this site is a skepticism/science blog, it is my personal blog and atheism is a topic dear to me.

Skepticism and atheism are two different things. They are related in many ways, but they are not one in the same. Skepticism follows the principles of scientific inquiry, providing evidence for claims. Atheism is simply a lack of belief. If you are a religious person for purely personal reasons and make no claims of “proof” of your beliefs, I don’t have a problem with you. If, however, you say that you can prove that your god or belief exists, then I want you to present me with your supporting evidence. If you cannot or do not do so, then I have a problem with you.

We all have our sacred cows, myself included (which I will not go into for, as fits my statement above, personal reasons). I am a skeptic despite this.

“The belief that all things are created solely for the utility of man has stained with many errors that most noble part of physics which deals with the ends of things.”

-Franz Maria Ulrich Theodor Hoch Aepinus, born on this day in 1724. Aepius was a Dutch physicist whose Tentamen theoriae electricitatis et magnetismi (”An Attempt at a Theory of Electricity and Magnetism”) was the first work to apply mathematics to the theory of electricity and magnetism. Aepinus’ experiments led to the design of the parallel-platecapacitor, a device used to store  energy in an electric field.

This is Part 7 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #7.

STATEMENT: “Physicist Melvin Cook, found that helium-4 enters our atmosphere from solar wind and radioactive decay of uranium. At present rates our atmosphere would accumulate current helium-4 amounts in less than 10,000 years.”

RESPONSE: Admittedly, the scientific data regarding this argument is a bit complicated, but Dave E. Matson has written a paper titled “How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?” and addresses the subject of atmospheric helium-4 amounts. Matson goes into great detail, and I shall summarize as best I can:

Helium-4 is the result of radioactive alpha decay. (definition: alpha decay occurs “because the nucleus [of an atom] has too many protons which cause excessive repulsion. In an attempt to reduce the repulsion, a Helium nucleus is emitted” (“Three Types of Radioactive Decay”, thinkquest.org).) Helium-4 is “produced” as it escapes from within the earth to the atmosphere. It is hypothesized that a small amount of helium-4 is lost as it is heated and escapes the atmosphere altogether. However, the “most probable mechanism for helium loss is photoionization of helium by the polar wind and its escape along open lines of the Earth’s magnetic field” (Matson). Polar wind accounts for an escape of helium-4 that is nearly identical to the estimated production. Similarly, helium-4 may escape from the atmosphere through a “direct interaction of the solar wind [...] during the short periods of lower magnetic-field intensity while the field is reversing. Sheldon and Kern (1972) estimated that 20 geomagnetic-field reversals over the past 3.5 million years would have assured a balance between helium production and loss” (Matson).

CONCLUSION: What’s missing from creationevidence.org’s argument (aka what is implied by their argument) is that if helium-4 is being produced at the rate that it is, the amount of helium-4 observed in the atmosphere indicates a young earth. As has been shown, however, there are several mechanisms that account for the loss of helium-4 in the atmosphere. “Thus,” Matson states, “the helium balance calculations provided by creationist Melvin Cook [...] cannot provide a reliable minimum estimate of the earth’s age. [The creationists' argument from helium-4 production] is a fatal oversimplification of a complex problem” (Matson).

Please visit our advertisers!

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

For those of you skeptics and scientists in the Madison, Wisconsin, area:

There is a new meetup.com group for Madison Skeptics. Anyone interested in skepticism or scientiic advocacy should join the group and add yourself to the mailing list. There is a meeting THIS SUNDAY, December 14th, at the Panera Bread restaurant at 3416 University Ave in Madison. I will be there, along with my two-month old son and probably my fiance. There is also a meetup scheduled for December 27th, although I will be out of town and unable to attend. Come out and enjoy some Panera bread and lively skepticism with other skeptics from the Madison area.

“A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.”

-Sir David Brewster, physicist noted for his experimental work in optics and polarized light (light in which all waves lie in the same plane.) He is known for Brewster’s Law, which relates the refractive index of a material to its polarizing angle (which is the incident angle at which reflected light becomes completely polarized). He patented the kaleidoscope in 1817.

I have decided to change things up a little bit with the Quote of the Day. From now on the quote will be from someone in science who was born, died, or did something awesome in science on this particular date.

Sir David Brewster was born on this day in 1781.

I love this quote because of it seems to be an explicit argument for evolution vs. religion, but it was spoken by Sir David Brewster three years before Darwin published his famous On the Origin of Species.