How can evolution account for irreducibly complex systems?
First, the term “irreducibly complex” is extremely difficult to apply to any one system, and it can never be absolutely proven that it applies to a system. However, these issues aside, evolution can produce such systems by working from precursor parts with slightly less functionality, adapting portions of its environment to replace missing parts, duplicating and slightly altering genes to produce a variety of different proteins, and reusing components of one system in the building of another. This is obviously a very brief explanation; see Talk.Origins – Darwin’s Black Box, Behe’s Empty Box. For the original presentation of the “irreducible complexity” view, see Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe.
