Irreducible complexity and Evolution

originally posted by: Krazysh0t

originally posted by: cyberjedi
a reply to: Krazysh0t

well you questioned why we refer to it as a motor, and so i explained it to you. You required explaining, so i figured maybe you hadnt seen the video.

I know why we refer to it as a motor. I never questioned that. I explained why IC isn't a valid theory and why it isn't a logically sound argument to compare the development process of a machine to the development process of a lifeform.

Sure, we create a machine based on a plan beforehand, the comparison is made because with the flagelli motor it is argued that it is the product of evolution, hence the bewilderment that this flagelli motor seems to be irreducible complex. If it is indeed irreducible complex, then it would also have to have been designed beforehand.

originally posted by: cyberjedi

originally posted by: TerryDon79
a reply to: cyberjedi

And they can also work as something else. Such as exporting proteins.

This explains it

That's IC debunked. Again.

This article does not debunk IC.

This one does

Irreducible complexity stems from the claim that some biological systems appear to be too complex to have arisen by natural selection. Specifically, it argues that if you take a part away from an organism and it stops functioning (analogous to taking the engine out of a car) then it must be irreducibly complex and cannot have evolved. It is one of the main arguments of the Intelligent Design movement.

The concept is considered to be mostly bollocks when applied to evolution because it fails to take into account numerous other pathways that a particular ability can evolve through — it assumes that evolution must go through "additive" processes to achieve its conclusion and this isn't the case. Most evolutionary biologists do not consider it science by any stretch of the imagination because the idea relies on personal incredulity and unwarranted assumptions.

Frequently, believers in irreducible complexity cite the eye as an example of something too complex to have evolved. They frequently introduce the argument with a question of the type, "What use is half an eye?". However if the question is recast as "Given a choice, would you prefer to be completely blind or have 50% of your present vision?", then it becomes clear that the question is badly formed, especially when keeping in mind that many species manage to survive with significantly less-advanced eyes. Examples include the polychaete worms, which can distinguish between light and dark;[7] the simple eye-cup of the flatworms, for finding the direction of a light source; jellyfish and scallops, with simple eyes for detecting movement;[8] the famous compound eyes of the insects, which can make out simple shapes, and ultimately the sophisticated single-lens eyes of the molluscs and vertebrates.

Another famed and also flawed example references "the watch on the beach". It goes as follows: "If you find a watch on the beach, do you assume it got there by chance, or do you assume it was made by an intelligent designer?" The example is flawed because watches and their parts do not reproduce or mutate. (And if they did, they could be produced by random mutation.[9]) Moreover, nobody would assume that the watch had simply been summoned into existence by some mystery force; they would not only assume a watchmaker, but a whole history of work in associated technologies by hundreds if not thousands of individuals. Oddly, no ID advocate has ever argued that the "designer" is a giant committee of unrelated inventors.

The above arguments appeal to the common sense of the "Average Joe". Popular support is, however, not part of the scientific method; bear in mind that a significant part of the world's population believes in astrology.

Although proponents offer irreducible complexity as evidence of intelligent design, this conclusion is questionable. Robustness is generally considered to indicate good design, not precariousness. Which parachute would you consider better designed — one which ceased to function if a single part was missing, or one which has a back-up pullcord? Irreducible complexity, if accepted as evidence of design, suggests at best crappy design.

And this one here just throws a logical paradox into your whole equation:

So who designed God?

Arguments from irreducible complexity must also take into account the question of whether or not God himself is a being of irreducible complexity:

Answering "Yes" sends you flying into an infinite regress of who-designed-God's-designer, who-designed-the-designer's-designer... (and so on, ad inifinitum). Keeping in mind that suddenly insisting "God designed himself!" would mean you allow for self-design — making the very existence of any designer superfluous to begin with.

Answering "No" means that life and the Universe couldn't have been intelligently designed either — because if even allmighty God (read: the most "specified and complex" and thus most intelligently designed entity ever) fails to meet the criteria of the design inference, then nothing else will.

a reply to: cyberjedi

But it's not because the individual parts of the "motor" have other uses outside of the "motor".

Like the article explained.

a reply to: cyberjedi

Stop looking at a species end result after evolution like its current state was how it was intended to look. The current species on the planet are the end result of many many many many many many mutations that didn't work or died out. We are the lucky ones.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

I just realised something. The op is a Behe believer. "Some things evolve while others are too complex to evolve" nonesense.

So while their god created some things the way they are, other things evolved because they're "too complex".

The thread is just a god of the gaps fallacy. So I'm out of here. Have fun

a reply to: cyberjedi

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
a reply to: cyberjedi

Fun fact: If you don't believe in evolution then you also don't believe in modern medical science, because modern medical science wouldn't be possible if evolutionary theory was false.

I am a professor of neurosurgery, I work and teach at a medical school, I do brain research, and in 20 years I’ve performed over 4000 brain operations. I never use evolutionary biology in my work. Would I be a better surgeon if I assumed that the brain arose by random events? Of course not. Doctors are detectives. We look for patterns, and in the human body, patterns look very much like they were designed. Doctors know that, from the intricate structure of the human brain to the genetic code, our bodies show astonishing evidence of design. That’s why most doctors–nearly two-thirds according to national polls–don’t believe that human beings arose merely by chance and natural selection. Most doctors don’t accept evolutionary biology as an adequate explanation for life. Doctors see, first-hand, the design of life.
I do use many kinds of science related to changes in organisms over time. Genetics is very important, as are population biology and microbiology. But evolutionary biology itself, as distinct from these scientific fields, contributes nothing to modern medicine.
Without using evolutionary theory, doctors and scientists have discovered vaccines (Jenner, in the 18th century, before Darwin was born), discovered that germs cause infectious diseases (Pasteur, in the 19th century, who ignored Darwin), discovered genes (Mendel, in the 19th century, who was a priest and not a supporter of Darwin’s theory), discovered antibiotics, and unraveled the secrets of the genetic code (the key to these discoveries was the discovery of the apparent design in the DNA double helix). Heart, liver, and kidney transplants, new treatments for cancer and heart disease, and a host of life-saving advances in medicine have been developed without input from evolutionary biologists. No Nobel prize in medicine has ever been awarded for work in evolutionary biology. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the only contribution evolution has made to modern medicine is to take it down the horrific road of eugenics, which brought forced sterilization and bodily harm to many thousands of Americans in the early 1900s. That’s a contribution which has brought shame–not advance–to the medical field.
So ‘Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?’ I wouldn’t. Evolutionary biology isn’t important to modern medicine. That answer won’t win the ‘Alliance for Science’ prize. It’s just the truth.

- Michael Egnor, M.D.

Go fling some ad honimems at the brain surgeon Michael Egnor like so many others are doing, that'll change the fact/reality/truth of the matter...not.

a reply to: whereislogic

Lol. You find a surgeon who doesn't believe in evolution and that suddenly disproves my point about modern medicine being founded on evolution? Your name is really apt. Where IS the logic?

As the proteins coopted for a new function acquire mutations that optimize their function they may become codependent and indispensable for a process.

a reply to: whereislogic

Go fling some ad honimems at the brain surgeon Michael Egnor like so many others are doing

will do, i love making IDiots cry.

originally posted by: cyberjedi
Hi ATS,


For those interested, i'd like to get you acquinted with irreducible complexity, and the way in which it seems to contradict the, i'll say, mainstream theory of evolution, and i'll get into selection a little bit.

Oh, dear Gods.

No, it doesn't contradict evolution - or, indeed, anything - as the "irreducible complexity" premise is flawed from the outset.

I think a great tool for analysing evolution is... the automobile. It has taken many evolutionary steps from the first days of a glorified box on wheels. Over the design generations, we have seen many new variations and ideas appearing. Some, like synchromesh, provide enough of a benefit that they stay with us, while others soon drop off apart from the occasional wankel-engine-powered evolutionary throwback.

Let's apply irreducible complexity to our evolutionary analogy. Is a modern car irreducibly complex? Well, try taking out the syncromesh component. The engine can no longer transmit power to the wheels. We can remove a single component and the entire system fails. It fits the criteria of irreducible complexity.

But here's the problem. You are taking one simple idea - that if you take away a necessary component of a system, it will stop functioning - and extrapolating that it is not possible to have a functional system without that component. This is the only way that the argument of irreducible complexity can actually work. It requires that the system must always have done that specific job, and that it must always have done it in that specific way.

If we return to our evolutionary analogy, the car, we quickly see how ridiculous this argument becomes. That particular car may now fail without the syncromesh system, but it's mechanical ancestors functioned without it. Synchromesh simply enabled the later generations to do their job more effectively. The mechanical ancestors could still to the job, they simply do it in a different (and less efficient) way.

"Irreducible complexity" is essentially just "lack of redundancy" and while there may well be some merit to using it as a interrogative lens during a design stage, it can only speak for the current generation of any design (whether mechanical or animal) that it is interrogating. You cannot use it to make any useful prediction about the possibility (or otherwise) of previous design generations.

In other words, it's complete nonsense when considering evolution. It's right up there with "Bananas were designed to fit the human hand therefore they must have been designed by God."

a reply to: cyberjedi

You can start by watching this short video. If you don't agree with the explanations given in the video, please give your reasoning. I'll link the references in another post.

originally posted by: TerryDon79
a reply to: Krazysh0t

I've never seen a penguin.

Just little dudes and dudettes in dinner suits.

Then how can you be sure penguins even exist?

I guess you must have FAITH in science, to inform you correctly. Much the same as a religious person would go to church to be informed of something they have no personal experience of.

Not that I am a religious person but, I can see the value in it.

The comparisons between Science, which explains reality in a very limited way and Religion, which does a poor job of explaining spirituality, it makes it clear, that, If you where to step back, you would see science and religion are the same thing.

Once these two bodies of knowledge merge, we will have spiritual science, and the human condition will improve immeasurably.

Science and Religion are irreducibly complex because the REALITY is, neither can exist without each other.

a reply to: cyberjedi

This paper address specifically the claims of Behe and his theory of "irreducible complexity" - which BTW, was coined by him - it is not a scientific term. I've highlighted a few relevant parts of the paper to point out some of the important factors.


Nucleic Acids Res. 2000 Jul 15; 28(14): 2794–2799.
PMCID: PMC102656
Evolution of biological information

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...


In this paper the well-established mathematics of information theory (1–3) is used to measure the information content of nucleotide binding sites (4–11) and to follow changes in this measure to gauge the degree of evolution of the binding sites.
For example, human splice acceptor sites contain ~9.4 bits of information on average (6). This number is called Rsequence because it represents a rate (bits per site) computed from the aligned sequences (4). (The equation for Rsequence is given in the Results.) The question arises as to why one gets 9.4 bits rather than, say, 52. Is 9.4 a fundamental number? The way to answer this is to compare it to something else. Fortunately, one can use the size of the genome and the number of sites to compute how much information is needed to find the sites. The average distance between acceptor sites is the average size of introns plus exons, or ~812 bases, so the information needed to find the acceptors is Rfrequency = log2 812 = 9.7 bits (6). By comparison, Rsequence = 9.4 bits, so in this and other genetic systems Rsequence is close to Rfrequency (4).
..........................


Even if the genome were to double in length (while keeping the number of sites constant), Rfrequency would only change by 1 bit, so the measure is quite insensitive. Likewise, the number of sites is approximately fixed by the physiological functions that have to be controlled by the recognizer. So Rfrequency is essentially fixed during long periods of evolution.
On the other hand, Rsequence can change rapidly and could have any value, as it depends on the details of how the recognizer contacts the nucleic acid binding sites and these numerous small contacts can mutate quickly. So how does Rsequence come to equal Rfrequency? It must be that Rsequence can start from zero and evolve up to Rfrequency. That is, the necessary information should be able to evolve from scratch.
................................................

The ev model quantitatively addresses the question of how life gains information, a valid issue recently raised by creationists (32) (R. Truman, www.trueorigin.org... ; 08-Jun-1999) but only qualitatively addressed by biologists (33). The mathematical form of uncertainty and entropy (H = –Σplog2p, Σp= 1) implies that neither can be negative (H ≥ 0), but a decrease in uncertainty or entropy can correspond to information gain, as measured here by Rsequence and Rfrequency. The ev model shows explicitly how this information gain comes about from mutation and selection, without any other external influence, thereby completely answering the creationists.

The ev model can also be used to succinctly address two other creationist arguments. First, the recognizer gene and its binding sites co-evolve, so they become dependent on each other and destructive mutations in either immediately lead to elimination of the organism. This situation fits Behe’s (34) definition of ‘irreducible complexity’ exactly (“a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning”, page 39), yet the molecular evolution of this ‘Roman arch’ is straightforward and rapid, in direct contradiction to his thesis. Second, the probability of finding 16 sites averaging 4 bits each in random sequences is 2–4 × 16 ≅ 5 × 10–20 yet the sites evolved from random sequences in only ~103 generations, at an average rate of ~1 bit per 11 generations. Because the mutation rate of HIV is only 10 times slower, it could evolve a 4 bit site in 100 generations, ~9 months (35), but it could be much faster because the enormous titer [1010new virions/day/person (17)] provides a larger pool for successful changes. Likewise, at this rate, roughly an entire human genome of ~4 × 109 bits (assuming an average of 1 bit/base, which is clearly an over ­estimate) could evolve in a billion years, even without the advantages of large environmentally diverse world-wide populations, sexual recombination and interspecies genetic transfer. However, since this rate is unlikely to be maintained for eukaryotes, these factors are undoubtedly important in accounting for human evolution. So, contrary to probabilistic arguments by Spetner (32,36), the ev program also clearly demonstrates that biological information, measured in the strict Shannon sense, can rapidly appear in genetic control systems subjected to replication, mutation and selection (33).

_______________________________________________________________________________

What the results of this research and other investigations demonstrate is that an organism can be "static" for very long periods of time. Information in genetic systems can be measured, the amount of information can be predicted, and the amount measured evolves to the amount predicted.

Now it's your turn to challenge this research and show why it's wrong.

a reply to: kennyb72

That is complete BS.

Science and Religion are not at all the same thing and they do not require each other to exist at all.

Religion once did exist without Science BTW.

originally posted by: Phantom423
a reply to: cyberjedi

You can start by watching this short video. If you don't agree with the explanations given in the video, please give your reasoning. I'll link the references in another post.

This video takes two examples of life engineering and then attempt to debunk one with the other.

Anything you discover that is a component of life, is engineered. You really have nothing to compare with to provide perspective. To suggest that this disproves, what has been coined 'irreducible complexity' is a fallacy based on incomplete knowledge.

The essential ingredients not included in any of this discussion is the etheric casing which channels energy and instructions, it is not understood, that the cell is a conscious entity and follows instructions from its hierarchical neighbour.

Intelligence created life and more importantly, sustains it. Take that channeled energy away from any biological machine and it nothing more than meat.

All sickness is an interruption in the flow of energy and is intrinsically affected by the state of consciousness of the spirit that possesses it.

a reply to: mOjOm

Science and Religion are not at all the same thing and they do not require each other to exist at all.

Science was born from religion, and will return to religion. You just need to redefine what religion is.

Religion was metaphysical science for the uneducated masses and is incomplete to the point that it is incomprehensible. Miracles performed are metaphysical science, it just looks like miracles to the uninitiated.

The book is full of practical wisdom and an introduction to metaphysical science and is valuable for that alone.

a reply to: Phantom423

The lengths that science will go to and the intellect expended in an attempt to deny their own divinity is endearing, but is also a necessary part of their own evolution of consciousness.

a reply to: kennyb72

Please explain how Science was born from Religion. Because it would seem that Science has almost always resulted in refuting what Religion often claims to be true.

Religion was metaphysical science for the uneducated masses and is incomplete to the point that it is incomprehensible.

I don't think that has changed much over time.

a reply to: mOjOm


Link

Most scientific and technical innovations prior to the scientific revolution were achieved by societies organized by religious traditions. Elements of the scientific method were pioneered by ancient pagan, Islamic, and Christian scholars. During the Islamic Golden Age foundations for the scientific method were laid by Ibn al-Haytham.[2][3] Roger Bacon, who is often credited with formalizing the scientific method, was a Franciscan friar

The pendulum swings between Science and Religion the only division is knowledge.