This is part of a series: Evolution’s Limits
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A few years ago, I tested evolution. In my simulation, there were 4 main phenomena:
- Evolution
- The practical limit of evolution
- Devolution
- Extinction due to devolution
Of these, I was able to find plenty of scientific papers documenting 3 of them. But I couldn’t find any studies looking for 1 of them – the practical limit of evolution.
EDIT: I phrased this poorly. There are plenty of scientific papers that claim to debunk irreducible complexity, but as Casey Luskin pointed out, they attack a straw-man version of of irreducible complexity, not the real thing. This article by Ken Miller references some of them, and gives a good summary of the reasoning behind them.
Here are some more:
I wrote that I couldn’t find any studies looking for irreducible complexity because the ones that I knew of that claimed to were actually looking for the wrong thing. I had planned to clarify this in a future post, but I realized that if someone only read this post, they would think that there wasn’t any research that even claimed to test the claim of irreducible complexity, which would be a false claim.
We Creationists call this limit Irreducible Complexity. Basically, if any machine is too complicated to appear by evolution, it’s irreducibly complex.
In this series, I’m going to read up on this limit and summarize what’s been said and written about it so far. I have the beginning of a way to test in a lab if something can or can’t appear by evolution. If someone else has thought of it or tried it, I’ll summarize their research. If not, I’ll explain my idea.
Michael Behe coined the term in his book Darwin’s Black Box.
I’m also going to experiment with smaller posts. I want to keep each post in this series under 600 words.
This is part of a series: Evolution’s Limits
Next:
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