pz

"DNAUnion:"

You are awfully longwinded and defensive. Slow down and stop babbling.

Behe's belated excuses don't rescue him. "Core", "system", "part", and "function" are all undefined or vague to the point of uselessness. As has been pointed out to you (and to Behe!) multiple times, IC systems can and do evolve, so the whole argument is pointless, anyway.

Nic Tamzek

Rather like a mousetrap in that respect.

nic

Principia

Heh, how can you expect a man who has spent a good 2-3 years on Behan apologetics not to miss the larger picture? I mean, gee, if I spent the amount of time that he apparently did on that last recycled-from-CF post, I'd like people to notice the work I did too -- paste it everywhere, and call for "discussion." LOL I think you miss the point, DD. All he really wants is just a pat on the back for standing up to Truth, Justice, and the American way.

*yawn* goodnight all.

DNAunion

DNAunion: No, a mousetrap isn't even made up of cells. What it is made up of is parts that are fundamental: composed of just one thing, not complex systems in themselves. On the other hand, a Panda's thumb has as just one of its parts, bone(s) - which are themselves composed of, among other things, bone cells called osteocytes. Thus in just this one part you have all the complexity and systemization of a cell - DNA replication, transcription, translation, anabolic and catabolic pathways, protein targeting, etc. - thousands of times over. Apples and oranges Nic, apples and oranges.

DNAunion

DNAunion: Well, from the lack of rebuttals to my post, looks like everyone agrees with me that Miller misrepresented Behe.

pz

Wrong.

Principia

LOL. Kinda like hearng the Iraqis say that the Americans are misrepresenting them about a whole bunch of things... Who gives a fvck?

Doubting Didymus

False dichotomy. There is another option, which is that some of us don't care. Frankly, I think miller is wasting breath. He could just as easily have said, "Yes, mr behe. that sure is an irreducibly complex system you've got there. Boy howdy how impressive. By the way, Evolution can easily produce IC systems." Thus, I find millers essays unneccesarily long. A single scentence should suffice.

Nic Tamzek

So, the wood in a mousetrap base ain't made of cells?

(DNAunion will reply that you could make it out of metal, so...

Hey, wait a minute DNA, we can make replacement earbones out of metal or ceramic or something noncellular, so I guess they are IC after all!

[/end pre-rebuttal])

Are you seriously telling me that a mousetrap made of metal would be IC, but an *exactly superimposable* mousetrap made of cells would not be IC?

IC is a scale-invariant concept or its meaningless. 'Tis impossible to include the mousetrap and exclude the earbones...

lpetrich

I'll give what I think is a good macroscopic example of irreducible complexity in the biological world.

Honeybee societies.

Queens and workers form an irreducibly-complex system.

Queens are dependent on workers for all their needs -- food, shelter, protection, etc. -- and are helpless on their own.

Workers are dependent on queens to replenish their numbers.

When one compares honeybees to solitary bees, one wonders how honeybee society could have evolved.

But there are species of bees that exemplify reasonable intermediate states. Bumblebees, for example.

Bumblebee queens are not completely dependent on their workers; they overwinter in isolation and found hives and care for their first offspring in isolation in the coming spring, as if they were solitary bees.

And it's much easier to go from solitary bees to bumblebees; all that is necessary is for some female bees to forgo their own reproduction in exchange for caring for their mothers' other offspring.

And going from bumblebees to honeybees is another straightforward step. All that is necessary is for new queens to recruit workers to help them found new hives; queens that do this no longer need to do all the tasks that a solitary bee would have to, and their skills can atrophy. And honeybee queens found hives by recruiting swarms of workers, who then proceed to search for good hive sites.

But Michael Behe is doing the equivalent of pointing to honeybees and wondering how they could have been the result of evolution.

But in some cases, there is the molecular equivalent of bumblebees; bacterial flagella are related to bacterial pore structures.

So can more such molecular bumblebees be found, or at least reasonably inferred, for the various molecular honeybees?