On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 10:31 AM, Bruce Johnson <johnson@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:

<http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity>

Evolution, at it's heart, is essentially a bodger. Complex mechanisms are made of smaller bits that may have been something else entirely to start.

I went to that link and read the article. This bit - arguing that component bits of something like the Krebs Cycle might have been part of something else originally - snagged my attention:

"each mutation can arise independently, spread through the population by natural selection, and combine through sexual reproduction (or gene transfer in simpler organisms)."

Doesn't this actually break natural selection, though? Organisms with currently-useless bits are less efficient than ones without them, so natural selection would not operate in favor of keeping an (only useful in the future after it meets its other half) mutation in the gene pool. It could still happen - humans have that pesky appendix, after all - but it wouldn't be *selected.* So we're back to random chemical junk (which doesn't do anything currently beneficial within an organism) randomly combining into something useful.

It seems to me that what would need to happen - for this argument against irreducible complexity to be valid - is for the components of each future beneficial chemical process to remain part of a functional currently-beneficial process (in order to be spread through the gene pool). The correct currently-beneficial processes would then need to simultaneously - in the same reproductive event - break down into individually-useless fragments, which fragments would then need to immediately re-combine into a new beneficial process.

That strikes me as some *incredibly* lucky timing . . .

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby

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