how does something that is irreducibly complex evolve step by step?
>>how does something that is irreducibly complex evolve step by step?<<
The term “irreducibly complex” has no scientific meaning. It is a specious term used by people who do not know science.
What does “irreducibly complex” even mean? Go study fractals, chaos theory, and cellular automata (all straightforward mathematical concepts), then get back to us about “irreducibly complex”.
To preemptively shatter your notion of “irreducibly complex”:
A human being develops from the fusion of just 2 cells into 1. Therefore the “irreducible complexity” of an adult human, literally, can be reduced to that single cell.
Likewise, any other species can be “reduced” to a single cell - some of which are, in fact, quite simple (yes, not trivially so).
Once that’s established, then the whole discussion reduces to the variations between embryonic cells, and the still-unanswered question of how _those_ got started (being rather hard to find in the fossil record).
This does not preclude the existence/involvement of God, just raises the point that _how_ God went about creation is nowhere close to explained-in-detail in Scripture. “God said...” - yeah, I got that, but as an engineer I’m legitimately curious about the process between “said” and “and there was”. That God is depicted as somehow a being of light also indicates that He does not operate on the same sense of time as we do (i.e.: sees everything, from moment commencing creation to the far future, all at once) so the concept of “day” was strained for the first few “days” and may not mean 24-hour periods as we know them as the term continued being used to describe the remainder of “the first 7 days” (24 hours, 10 billion years, what’s the difference to God?).