What do ID proponents mean by “irreducible complexity” and how do they argue that this concept implies design?
Michael Behe, a Discovery Institute fellow, coined the term irreducible complexity as a description of organisms that are so complex that they could not come into existence gradually. He uses a mousetrap as an example: a mousetrap has many different parts, and if one of them did not work, you wouldn’t have an inferior mousetrap, rather your mousetrap would not work at all. Therefore, you should assume that the mousetrap must have had a designer. The principal flaw in his argument, which has been repeatedly shown by scientists familiar with evolution, is that no theory of evolution imagines that the complex entity spontaneously appeared. The organism became complex over a long period of time, having undergone gradual transformations. Indeed, Behe’s irreducible complexity is a perfect example of the flaw in ID. It sees a complex object, and without understanding how it came into existence, imagines it must have been created spontaneously.
Michael Behe, a Discovery Institute fellow, coined the term “irreducible complexity” as a description of organisms that are so complex that they could not come into existence gradually. He uses a mousetrap as an example: a mousetrap has many different parts, and if one of them did not work, you wouldn’t have an inferior mousetrap, rather your mousetrap would not work at all. Therefore, the mousetrap couldn’t work at all until all the parts were in place. In biology, structures that don’t function are weeded out by natural selection, so Behe concludes that complex biological systems must have been designed with all their parts in place as well. However, evolution does not necessarily occur in a linear progression, with each new part being added on, one at a time. Instead, structures develop for one purpose, and then get co-opted for a different task. Scientists have been able to chart these changes in many organisms that seem irreducibly complex in their current form, showing how natura
