Smoke and Mirrors [Ken Miller on Dover, Pt. 2]

Discover ^ | January 3, 2009 | Ken Miller

[Coyoteman]

[References omitted]

In Part 1, I showed that Casey Luskin’s charges with respect to my testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover were completely false. Michael Behe did indeed argue, throughout his 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box, that the “entire blood-clotting system” was “irreducibly complex,” and I cited examples from that book to prove it. Therefore, the existence of a living organism missing so much as a single part of that system was indeed a falsification of ID’s blood-clotting argument. Given that we now have examples of organisms (jawless fish) missing at least 5 components of that “irreducibly complex” system, it’s perfectly obvious that Luskin’s attempts to rehabilitate that argument are hopeless.

Ever the optimist, Part 2 of Luskin’s end-of-year project is to salvage Of Pandas and People, the creationist-turned-ID textbook that was at the heart of the Dover trial. Incredibly, in trying to accomplish this feat, he fails to understand the very argument he’s trying to prop up. What Luskin does not seem comprehend is that irreducible complexity is not an argument for design — it is an argument against evolution. Simply stated, when a system is labeled as “irreducibly complex,” the ID proponent is making a claim for the unevolvability of that system. The reason that such systems are said to be unevolvable is because their individual parts are supposedly nonfunctional until they are all combined into a single, working system. As Behe has said and written, “any irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.” As Behe further points out, since those parts are nonfunctional on their own, they could not have been assembled by evolution, because “…natural selection can only choose systems that are already working…”

That would be a powerful argument against evolution — if it were true. Unfortunately, it’s not...

Continues...

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP