ID is a lot more than “intelligence of the gaps.” It is an argument from effect to cause:
“Based on our uniform experience, we know of only one type of cause that produces irreducibly complex systems: intelligence. Whenever we encounter complex systems - whether integrated circuits or internal combustion engines - and we know how they arose, invariably a designing intelligence played a role.”
It is, rather, Darwinism that has a “gaps” problem, for it supposes that a cause (random mutation and natural selection) can produce an effect (irreducible complexity) when no such causal relationship has ever been observed.
ID makes the inference that, since the cases of irreducible complexity for which we know the cause are always due to intelligence, it is reasonable to conclude that irreducible complexity for which the cause is unobserved is due to intelligence. Where there is smoke there is fire.
Cheers,
Dave T.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Succinctly Stated
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No matter how many times people chant that evolution cannot produce irreducibly complex systems, they are still wrong. The only way to reach that conclusion is to ignore what we have seen in terms of genetic similarity we can observe in the lab and biological change we have seen in the past century. (A proper argument also requires stating which definition of IC it assumes: Behe's old definition wherein each part is critical to function, Behe's newer definition based on supposedly unselected steps, or some other.)
Counterexamples: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5689/1433 (evolution went from two autocatalytic steps to three, adding a different color).
http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/icdmyst/ICDmyst.html discusses two that predate human observation (Venus flytrap and hemoglobin) and one that happened in the last 70 years (PCP digestion in bacteria).
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/evolve_irreducible.html hypothesizes a mechanism for a spider's unusual (IC) predative technique.
In marginally related news, I see that too few people got the note that Anthony Flew decided in December 2004 that he had been wrong about deism, and that there were scientifically adequate explanations for biogenesis. In Flew's words, "I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction."
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