Matt Donnelly, "Making irreducible complexity a bit simpler" (2005)

Making irreducible complexity a bit simpler
> <!-- Blurb --><span class="smallHeader">One reporter charges that Michael Behe has revised his definition of irreducible complexity, thus rendering it a toothless tiger<span>
> <br> By Matt Donnelly
> <span class="dateText">(October 13, 2005)<span>

Making irreducible complexity a little simpler

One common knock on ID is that its proponents do not publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals. James Curtsinger of the Minnesota Daily, a student-run newspaper at the University of Minnesota, decided to investigate this claim. He says he was inspired by a recent campus lecture by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, perhaps the leading ID proponent in the United States:

Use Google to find “Entrez PubMed,” which will take you to a database of 15 million peer-reviewed publications in the primary scientific literature. The site, maintained by the National Library of Medicine, allows users to enter a search term and retrieve references to relevant publications.

For instance, enter “natural selection” in the search box and click “go”; about 14,000 references will be found. “Mutation” gets 40,000. “Speciation” gets 5,000. “Human origins” gets 22,000. “Behe intelligent design” gets … zero.

Not one publication in PubMed contains the terms “Behe,” “intelligent,” and “design.” The same holds for “Behe irreducible complexity.” A less restrictive search for “intelligent design” finds 400 papers, but many are not relevant because the words are common in other contexts.

To get more useful information, enter “intelligent design” in quotation marks, which searches for the two words together. When I searched last week, this produced 25 references, of which 13 were irrelevant to this discussion, five were news articles, six were critical of ID, and one was a historical review. “Irreducible complexity” in quotes gets five hits, one irrelevant and the others critical of ID.

What does this exercise prove? It depends on who’s answering that question. Many scientists would argue it means that ID can’t withstand scientific scrutiny. Supporters of ID say it points to a pronounced academic bias against ID.

Putting that question aside, Curtsinger also made another discovery, namely that the very definition of irreducible complexity, a central claim of ID proponents, may be undergoing a bit of an evolution:

While you’re at PubMed, try searching for “bacterial flagella secretion.” One of the resulting papers, by SI Aizawa (2001), reports that some nasty bacteria possess a molecular pump, called a type III secretion system, or TTSS, that injects toxins across cell membranes.

Much to Dr. Behe’s distress, the TTSS is a subset of the bacterial flagellum. That’s right, a part of the supposedly irreducible bacterial “outboard motor” has a biological function!

When I asked Dr. Behe about this at lunch he got a bit testy, but acknowledged that the claim is correct (I have witnesses). He added that the bacterial flagellum is still irreducibly complex in the sense that the subset does not function as a flagellum.

Why is this important?

His response might seem like a minor concession, but is very significant. The old meaning of irreducible complexity was, “It doesn’t have any function when a part is removed.” Evidently, the new meaning of irreducible complexity is “It doesn’t have the same function when a part is removed.”

The new definition renders irreducible complexity irrelevant to evolution, because complex adaptations are widely thought to have evolved through natural selection co-opting existing structures for new functions, in opportunistic fashion.

For much more on ID, see the November issue of Science & Theology News. Subscribe now and get your first four issues free.