In 1996, the Intelligent Design advocate Michael
Behe published a book titled “Darwin's Black
Box”, and in which, he asserted that certain
biological systems, such as the human eye,
are irreducibly Complex and that therefore
they must’ve had a designer… by a very,
very specific designer… this, is the Argument
from Irreducible Complexity Debunked.
So what exactly does Irreducible Complexity mean?
That would be a good place to start right?
And what exactly would be a good example of
something that's irreducible complex? Well,
to quote Behe, the man who coined the term
in the first place, "irreducible complexity
is just a fancy phrase I use to mean a single
system which is composed of several interacting
parts, and where the removal of any one of
the parts causes the system to cease functioning."
To illustrate such a system he goes on to
use the example of a mousetrap. A traditional
mousetrap is composed of five interacting
parts; the base, the catch, the spring, the
hammer, and the hold-down bar – and all
of these parts must be in place for the mousetrap
to function. Critically, he emphasizes, the
removal of just one piece causes the system
to cease functioning. Behe then goes on to
explain that certain biological systems, such
as the human eye, are also Irreducibly Complex,
and that due to their irreducible complexity
(and this is where the real assertion is being
made) they could not have evolved via small
modification through natural selection. However,
for the purpose of clarity, let’s present
this argument in a syllogistic form: Irreducible
Complexity can only be created by an intelligent
designer. The human eye is irreducibly complex.
Hence, an intelligent designer must’ve created
the human eye. Therefore, god exists. So,
in debunking this argument where shall we
start? How about with the fact that it commits
a Special Pleading Fallacy? A Special Pleading
Fallacy occurs when someone attempts to exempt
something from a rule or principle without
justifying why that something is an exception,
and in the case of the Argument from Irreducible
Complexity, this something is god. If one
is to accept that the human eye must’ve
been created by a designer, then surely, a
force or being capable of deliberately creating
such a system would itself be infinitely more
irreducible complex and therefore must’ve
also had a designer. The second flaw I’ll
expose, is that the Argument from Irreducible
Complexity is yet just another religious Argument
from Ignorance… If we were to grant the
assertion that certain biological systems
could not have evolved via small modifications
through natural selection, all this would
do is discard natural selection as the potential
answer. It wouldn’t lend any credence, and
certainly wouldn’t prove, that an intelligent
designer must’ve created such systems…
that’s seriously not how logic works. And
this fact brings us to another fallacy committed
by the Argument from Irreducible Complexity…
that of the Black & White. The subtle but
overwhelming assertion that this argument
makes is that only one of two conclusions
can account for irreducible complexity – that
being natural selection or intelligent design,
but it doesn’t substantiate why these two
conclusions are the only possibilities. To
illustrate how absurd this assertion is, consider
the follow more obvious Black & White Fallacy:
if I were to assert that the Earth either
orbits around Mars or it orbits around Uranus,
and then asserted that it doesn't orbit around
Uranus and therefore must revolve around Mars,
I’d have committed a Black and White Fallacy
akin to the one made by the Argument from
Irreducible Complexity. But let’s now get
to what is in my opinion the most irritating
flaw that this argument commits… like the
vast majority of intelligent design arguments,
it ignores and/or misrepresents Evolution
by Natural Selection. Behe’s assertion that
natural selection cannot account for certain
biological systems is flat out nonsense. If
we take the eye alone, which is arguably the
poster-boy for irreducible complexity, we
actually know a great deal about its evolution.
If you’re seriously interested in learning
how the eye evolved, I’ve put a few links
in the description to some of Dawkins’ work,
but for what it’s worth here’s a very
brief synopsis: The most basic of eyes are
called ‘eye-spots’, and they’re found
in even single-celled organisms such as Euglena.
These eyespots are essentially photoreceptive
proteins that can sense light and shadows
but can’t form an image – and while they
might be crude, they nevertheless provide
a massive advantage for detecting the likes
of predators. Cup-eyes, which can be found
in organisms such as planarian worms, are
basically a curved sheet of eye-spots, that
due to their curvature possess the capacity
to detect the direction of light and shadows,
which obviously is a huge improvement to eye-spots.
Pin-eyes, which are found in organisms such
as the Nautilus, are the result of cup-eyes
progressively curving to make a circle, which
enables the organism to see distinct but blurry
images. And lens-eyes, which organisms such
as the human possess, are pin-eyes that have
evolved a transparent sphere of gunge at the
pin of the eye, which focuses light beams
by means of refraction. This might sound like
a big jump, but to quote Dawkins, “to get
a really good image you do need a decently
curved lens, but any old bit of gunge which
is transparent will do – if it’s just
approximately curved”. Hence, not only do
we know that biological systems such as the
eye can evolve by means of natural selection,
we actually have different stages of eye evolution
in living organisms… And finally, as the
last flaw I’ll cover in this video, and
one that directly follows from the argument
ignoring and/or misrepresenting natural selection,
is that it commits a Personal Incredulity
Fallacy. Behe’s assertion that certain biological
systems cannot be the product of small modifications
via natural selection is an admission that
he is ignorant of a topic that he wrote an
entire book about… which if I’m honest,
is kind of sad… If one doesn’t understand
something, this doesn’t mean that this thing
is invalid. So, to recap, the Argument from
Irreducible Complexity is flawed because:
It commits a Special Pleading Fallacy; It
commits an Argument from Ignorance Fallacy;
It commits a Black & White Fallacy; It ignores
and misrepresents Natural Selection; and,
It commits a Personal Incredulity Fallacy.
Anyhow, as always, thank you kindly for the
view, and I’ll leave you with this overwhelmingly
powerful argument to consider… Irreducible
Complexity can only be debunked by a YouTuber
with over 100,000 subscribers. This video
debunks Irreducible Complexity. Hence, a YouTuber
with over 100,000 subscribers must’ve created
this video. Therefore, I have 100,000 subscribers!
Well… that was easy!
