Ping for stupid 2nd law argument.
I can't really say much about the 2nd Law of Thermodyamics argument because you have questioned my sources (Schneider [Shannon], Jaynes and Adami [Kolmogorov]) and I am awaiting a response from the resident experts on the Forum to confirm these authorities and my understanding of their publications. For those interested in my position here is the link: post 1773 on the hysterical thread.
Concerning the eyes and irreducible complexity, I do have a few remarks.
First, there are two general types of complexity - least description (Kolmogorov, self-organizing or cellular automata, and physical complexity) and least time (functional complexity, irreducible complexity, specified complexity and metatransition - a kind of punctuated equilibrium). A summary of each type with source links is posted at 875 on the Plato thread.
My personal favorites - because they are can be quantified and are widely accepted - are Kolmogorov and functional complexity.
Secondly, the issue with eyeness goes more to the fact that eyes developed concurrently across phyla, including between vertebrates and invertebrates. Experiments sharing eyelessness genes between a mouse and a fly are evidence. This is contrary to the original formulation by Darwin but may be explained by immutable (or mutation resistent) master control genes.
But if such is the case, one is left wondering why that should be. Moreover, it would indicate that evolution is not happenstance at all ("random") but rather directed. IOW, it goes to the Intelligent Design argument.
Q: What is it that makes functional complexity so difficult to comprehend?
S: The evolution of living creatures appears to require an essential ingredient, a specific form of organization. Whatever it is, it lies beyond anything that our present knowledge of physics or chemistry might suggest; it is a property upon which formal logic sheds absolutely no light. Whether gradualists or saltationists, Darwinians have too simple a conception of biology, rather like a locksmith improbably convinced that his handful of keys will open any lock. Darwinians, for example, tend to think of the gene rather as if it were the expression of a simple command: do this, get that done, drop that side chain. Walter Gehring's work on the regulatory genes controlling the development of the insect eye reflects this conception. The relevant genes may well function this way, but the story on this level is surely incomplete, and Darwinian theory is not apt to fill in the pieces.
The eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites. Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance. It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes. These data have confounded the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent structures. So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the Untied States, Science, reported: "The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod [mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye has to be reexamined." The significance of this statement must not be lost. We are being asked to reexamine the idea that evolution is a free agent. The convergence, the similarity of these genes, is so great that it could not, it did not, happen by chance random reactions.
Weiss: How the Eye got Its Brain
Interview with Gehring: Master Control Genes