Irreducible complexity- the challenges have been rebutted (if not refuted)

I will now discuss a macroscopic example of biological irreducible complexity and show how it can have evolved; this ought to make some of the principles clearer.Honeybee societies are irreducibly complex. Queens depend on workers for all their needs; food, shelter, protection, etc. Workers depend on queens to replenish their numbers. Not surprisingly, honeybees found new hives by a queen leaving an existing hive with a swarm of workers.So how could such societies have been a result of evolution from some species of solitary bee?Michael Behe does the equivalent of looking at solitary bees and honeybees and wondering what could possibly bridge the gap.But there are some social bee species that provide plausible intermediate states.Bumblebees are social, yet bumblebee queens are not completely dependent on their workers as honeybee queens are. Bumblebee queens overwinter in isolation and found new hives in the following spring, doing all the work of caring for the first brood of workers until they mature. Thus acting like a solitary bee.And a bumblebee-like bee can become the ancestor of honeybees by this route: departing queens hoping to found hives could recruit some workers to assist them. These prove very helpful -- so helpful that queens lose the ability to have an independent existence, thus becoming dependent on their workers.Something similar could well have happened to the molecular pathways that Behe discusses; what would be especially helpful is finding or plausibly reconstructing some counterpart of bumblebees.

Does Mr.Behe have any explanation for how intelligent design physically accomplishes the things that we use evolution to descibe/

Thread moved here from the The Great Debate forum.

This analogy is just a variant of the "watchmaker" analogy. The basic watchmaker analogy goes:"If you walked across the beach, and ran into a watch, you wouldn't just assume that it, with all of its complex interworking parts, just 'evolved'. You would assume that a watchmaker made it."However, the watchmaker analogy has several critical flaws.1) To make it like real life, if you dug down in the soil beneath the watch, you'd find millions of other watches. The deeper you got, the simper they'd get. They'd have less precise timing mechanisms, simpler gear trains, etc. Plus, watches that we already saw would need to be breeding, and have observable differences in their "baby watches", including, but not limited to, additional gears, size and shapes of gears, additional or missing shafts, slightly different sized/shaped casings, different amounts of power, etc. Most of these would happen very rarely, but they would happen.2) If you walked along the beach, and found an atomic bomb, would you assume that a watchmaker made it? Of course not, you'd assume that a team of nuclear scientists made it. This argument argues for polytheism. Yet, the known processes of natural selection account for things as different from each other in the natural world as a watch is different from a bomb.

The trouble with saying that the watchmaker analogy doesn't work because it is a living system, is based on the premise that because life is so abundant and diverse, we take it for granted.
The fact that the watch is not alive actually makes it more likely that it could turn up by chance than biological organisms. The simple cell is not only irreducably complex but it is also 'alive'.The fact that it can self replicate and make adjustments for genetic irregularites make the watch look pathetic in comparison

oops lots of grammatical errors

1) There's no such thing as irreducable complexity. All complexity is reducable via "scaffolds" and other simple structures.2) "Alive" doesn't mean anything except that the cell is mediating certain chemical reactions in a programmed way. Life isn't magic. It's chemistry. Yes. And that's precisely why cells can come about through evolution. They self-replicate. And so far intelligent design hasn't come close to ever having made anything as complex as a cell, so why assume it ever has? Especially when evolutionary algorhythms repeatedly give rise to designs approaching the kind of complexity cells have?

That would be a good argument - if you were arguing against spontaneous generation. You're not. You're arguing against evolution, and as a consequence, you need to have an argument not about a complex organism just appearing, but instead you need an argument against progressive changes. The fossil record does not indicate sudden appearences - that's where the very concept of evolution came from. Early geologists (who were creationist, like everyone else) had trouble explaining what they kept encountering. In fact, the first explanation that they began to use to explain things was that there were "many creations", each at successive times, with God destroying everything between each creation and starting again.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Hi Crash, I beg to differ, if IC is defined as a system that fails when one part is removed, then IC is abundant. What is unwarranted, however, is the claim that it cannot evolve.Mark

But of course, that's not the definition that creationists use. They're defining IC as "any system that could not have evolved because the removal of a single element collapses the system."There's no such system, for exactly the reason you say - systems that fall apart at the removal of single elements can still be constructed piece-by-piece.

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I think I see what Larry is getting at. If I can explain by analogy, you can repair a Dodge with parts from a Chevy, but you'll run into lots of problems with parts that don't fit, and those require some extra work. You can borrow from Behe, but some parts don't fit with your views, and you need to address those issues. Is that it, Larry?

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It seems to me that too much is being asked of John Paul here. Why not simply use the parts that fit well for what you want to do with them for your own project and forget involving yourself with extra work on parts that don't fit? Wouldn't that tend to draw the thread off topic and to serve as a means of distracting John Paul from the objective he wishes to achieve here? We all draw resource from sources which may not be compatible in every way with our thinking from time to time.

Crash, I agree, they seem to think that because IC can be shown to exist, it is unevolvable by definition. It isn't.Mark

The following is a quote by a research scientist attempting to explain the evolutionary path to the irreducable complexity of web making. interesting that the nearest ancestor to a spider he can identify is a king crab.Notice that the silk glands have come through the ranks of getting rid of body waste, finding his way home with pheromones and then silk production. What a shame that a reputable scientist gives himself over to such hogwash because he can't believe that the spider could have come from divine origin.Spiders evolved from ancestors that had limbs on the abdomen, as did arthropods like crustaceans such as crayfish. In fact, one of their few living marine relatives, Limulus, the so-called "king crabs", has retained abdominal limbs, which have been lost or greatly modified in terrestrial spiders and other arachnids. The spiders' spinnerets are almost certainly derived from these ancestral abdominal limbs. In the basal (lowest) segments of spiders' limbs are small excretory glands - the coxal glands - that secrete and excrete waste body fluids. It seems that the silk glands may represent highly modified excretory glands that now manufacture silk instead of waste products, just as the spinnerets represent highly modified limbs. It is possible that an intermediate stage in this process could have been the production of a secretion that included pheromone (scent) chemicals put out by the spider as a primitive "signal line" by which a spider could find its way back to its retreat burrow. This role was then taken over by the production of silk. The silk then became useful not only as a safety line, but also for prey capture, manufacturing egg sacs and a host of other activities.
[Modified from text by Dr Mike Gray - Principal Research Scientist (Spiders)]

Do you have specific evidence that this pathway is impossible, or are you just arguing from your own refusal to believe anything evolutionary?I'm not impressed with arguments from incredulity. What you will or won't believe has nothing to do with what is.

What I am basically saying is that there can be no compelling explanation for the fact that for a spider to make a web there needs to be all the aparatus and substances in place as well as the program in the spiders brain to be able to make it. the web making ability must be a program because otherwise when a spider had no other contact with spiders from birth he would not know how to make it.
consequently the genetic information in the spider has to be added to in many varied spheres for web making to be possible and if all these spheres were not so altered at the same time then you would have a tragic little creature with more functions than it could use.
this indivisible behavior could just as easily be demonstated in a cobra. the glands for poison, the holes through the fangs the instinct to bite all have to be in place, and the poison has to be a perfect composition of proteins to disable its prey or everything else is irrelevant. even the capacity to swallow an animal whole would be irrrelevant if it could not immobilize its victim.
Maybee this is an argument from incredulity but to me it's the most common sense way to show the faulty logic of darwinian evolution.