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what is too complex for evolution?

RussDill

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Many creationists (or those who would otherwise want to use the god in the gaps argument) often point to biological structures or interactions, saying that they are too complex for evolution. After careful study of the fossil record and living organisms, plausible explainations can be found.

However, I ask this, what biologically possible structures, but evolutionarily implosible structures, can you think of? What, if you saw a living creature with, would you consider too complex. Maybe radio communication? Biologically generated explosives for use in hunting?
 
RussDill said:
Many creationists (or those who would otherwise want to use the god in the gaps argument) often point to biological structures or interactions, saying that they are too complex for evolution. After careful study of the fossil record and living organisms, plausible explainations can be found.

However, I ask this, what biologically possible structures, but evolutionarily implosible structures, can you think of? What, if you saw a living creature with, would you consider too complex. Maybe radio communication? Biologically generated explosives for use in hunting?
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A living being whose descendants have a completely differente DNA than theirs.
 
Easier, also a Living being whose descendant's only have usefull DNA, getting rid of all junk DNA present in its parents
 
Lucifuge Rofocale said:
Easier, also a Living being whose descendant's only have usefull DNA, getting rid of all junk DNA present in its parents
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I don't think that's impossible. An unlikely combination of deletion mutations, but not impossible.

Actually, this raises a good point. Should we be looking for things that are actually impossible or will you settle for "improbable to the point of never expecting it to happen in several billion universe lifetimes"? Dawkins has a number of "can't get there from here" scenarios in one of his books -- Climbing Mt. Improbable, I think --- where he describes a biologically possible event but points out there's no evolutionary sequence likely to produce it.
 
new drkitten said:
I don't think that's impossible. An unlikely combination of deletion mutations, but not impossible.

Actually, this raises a good point. Should we be looking for things that are actually impossible or will you settle for "improbable to the point of never expecting it to happen in several billion universe lifetimes"? Dawkins has a number of "can't get there from here" scenarios in one of his books -- Climbing Mt. Improbable, I think --- where he describes a biologically possible event but points out there's no evolutionary sequence likely to produce it.
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Should I add "always"? A living being who gets rid of the junk DNA inherited by its parents, and whose descendands do that too ad infinitum. It would imply design, I guess.
 
What, if you saw a living creature with, would you consider too complex. Maybe radio communication? Biologically generated explosives for use in hunting?
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An electric eel has specialized muscles that generate electricity (The current is strong enough to cause pain in humans). If it evolved a spark gap of some sort (two antenne) it could generate radio waves. But what would it gain biologicaly ? Communication? Radar?(water is a bad conductor of RF)

And there is a beetle ( I don't remember what it is called; bombadier beetle possibly?) that excretes two hypergolic chemicals that "explode" as a defence mechinizim.


edited to add:
Yep, it the bombadier beetle. check this out if your interested.
http://faunanet.gov.au/wos/factfile.cfm?Fact_ID=165
 
I don't think anyone knows exactly how the Bombadier Beetle got the way it is for sure; but there has been work done which has come up with a plausible possibility.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html

"Too complex for evolution" ignores the staggeringly long time that evolution has had to do its stuff. The problem is that we really can't understand what one million years is, never mind the three billion years that life has been evolving on earth for.
 
uruk said:
An electric eel has specialized muscles that generate electricity (The current is strong enough to cause pain in humans). If it evolved a spark gap of some sort (two antenne) it could generate radio waves. But what would it gain biologicaly ? Communication? Radar?(water is a bad conductor of RF)

And there is a beetle ( I don't remember what it is called; bombadier beetle possibly?) that excretes two hypergolic chemicals that "explode" as a defence mechinizim.


edited to add:
Yep, it the bombadier beetle. check this out if your interested.
http://faunanet.gov.au/wos/factfile.cfm?Fact_ID=165
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If you add in a flask the two chemicals the bombardier beetle uses, the just heat up a bit and turn brown. They do not "explode".
 
Zep,

You beat me to it. Here's the relevant section from talkorigins :

Much creationist literature gives an inaccurate account of the process. Based on an admittedly sloppy translation of a 1961 article by Schildknecht and Holoubek, [Kofahl, 1981] Duane Gish claimed that hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinones would explode spontaneously if mixed without a chemical inhibitor, and that the beetle starts with a mix of all three and adds an anti-inhibitor when he wants the explosion. [Weber, 1981] In fact, the two do not explode when mixed, as others have demonstrated. [Dawkins, 1987, p. 86-87] (Schildknecht did propose a physical inhibitor which kept the mixture from degrading in undisected beetles; in fact, the degradation he saw was probably simply a result of exposure to the air.) Gish still used the mistaken scenario after being corrected by Kofahl in 1978. [Weber, 1981] The same mistake is also repeated in books by Hitching in 1981, Huse in 1983 and 1993, and twice in a creationist magazine in 1990 [Anon, 1990a, b].

In a creationist children's book, Rue does a better job describing the chemistry but gets the physical mechanism wrong instead, saying the liquid shoots through the firing chamber and doesn't explode until outside the beetle. "If it exploded inside, it would blow any Bombardier Beetle to smithereens." [Rue, 1984, p. 23] In fact, it is because the explosion occurs inside the firing chamber that its force can be directed against a threat.

One must wonder how much weight an argument of design carries if the people making it don't know what the design looks like.
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I fail to see why this is a complex thing that couldn't have evolved. It's a straight path from, say, a mildy irritating secretion to one that is flung with a shake to one that evolves a special organ for ejection.
 
Beerina said:
I fail to see why this is a complex thing that couldn't have evolved. It's a straight path from, say, a mildy irritating secretion to one that is flung with a shake to one that evolves a special organ for ejection.
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I don't believe that it's the physical process of ejection that is considered "complex," but the chemistry involved. It's the "what use is half an eye?" problem revisited --- given the relatively exact mixture and proportions of chemicals involved, a beetle that had evolved to produce only one of the chemicals involved (say, for example, hydrogen peroxide but not hydroquinones, or both the peroxide and the hydroquinones, but not the catalases) would appear to be at a substantial evolutionary disadvantage over a beetle that simply said "the hell with chemical warfare, I'm going to evolve fast legs and run away from danger") . It's a classic "hopeful monster" of the sort that evolutionary theory predicts will not happen. (Note to the creationists on-board: this is an example of a positive prediction of evolutionary theory --- no hopeful monsters.)

The answer, of course, is that there actually is an evolutionary advantage to secreting a peroxide/hydroquinone mixture; it's still noxious (as are quinones alone), but non-explosive.
 
My problem with irreducible complexity is that the reasons why some particular feature is considered "too complex" are never discussed. An eye is too complex to have developed spontaneously? Says who, and how did they come to that conclusion?

I don't think there is much merit to the idea regardless, for all the usual reasons, but there is absolutely no reason to take it seriously for even one second until it is backed up by more than a good ol' argument from personal incredulity.

Jeremy
 
c4ts said:
Whoever said evolution was a spontaneous process?
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By "spontaneously," I mean with no intermediate stages. As I'm sure we all know, this was not the case with the eye. I'm using that as an example to show that, even in the most extreme (mis)application of the idea of irreducible complexity, the problem of having no rational criteria for "too complex" is insurmountable.

Jeremy
 
toddjh said:
By "spontaneously," I mean with no intermediate stages. As I'm sure we all know, this was not the case with the eye. I'm using that as an example to show that, even in the most extreme (mis)application of the idea of irreducible complexity, the problem of having no rational criteria for "too complex" is insurmountable.
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You may be throwing some baby out with the bathwater here. Certainly, "irreducible complexity" in the hands of idiots like Behe and Dembski is deeply flawed, but the flaw is primarily the usual creationist problem of "find the answer first, then figure out what evidence supports the answer." They're approaching the question backwards, which I suppose is the best way when you've got your head so far up your butt you're seeing out your anus.

On the other hand, the question of evolutionary complexity, properly approached (i.e. in a forward direction) is a legitimate one that has been asked by legitimate scholars. What kinds of things legitimately could not evolve because they have no evolutionary precursers? As a related question, can we legitimately produce proofs ("rational criteria," if you will) that some structures are "too complex."

In this light, Behe's original definition ("A single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function of the system, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning") is flawed as a definition, not as a concept. Basically, there are things known to be irreducibly complex under this definition that can demonstrably be evolved. However, just because Behe got the definition wrong doesn't imply that there isn't a correct definition.
 
toddjh said:
By "spontaneously," I mean with no intermediate stages. As I'm sure we all know, this was not the case with the eye. I'm using that as an example to show that, even in the most extreme (mis)application of the idea of irreducible complexity, the problem of having no rational criteria for "too complex" is insurmountable.
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Followup to my earlier followup: I managed to dig up some interesting formalizations that may provide some rational criteria for "too complex." Let me start by referring you to Mishkin Berteig's paper:

Skipping the rather technical definitions, he develops the notion of evolution as the transitive closure of mutation, and proposes that "a system is irreducible if we cannot find any less fit predecessor genotype that can be mutated to the genotype in question," which seems to me a facially reasonable definition. Of course, this definition is neutral about whether such a system fitting the definition actually exists.

Another way of approaching this question would be to phrase it in terms of the ergodicity of the gene pool. Given a particular genome (or set of genomes in a population), is it possible by a set of defined mutations to achieve all other genomes? Is it "practical" (using a probabilistic definition -- for example, expected occurrences of at least 0.5 over the lifetime of the universe)?
 
new drkitten said:
Basically, there are things known to be irreducibly complex under this definition that can demonstrably be evolved. However, just because Behe got the definition wrong doesn't imply that there isn't a correct definition.
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Thanks for the reply. Yes, I was mostly referring to Behe's top-down approach. His basic argument seems to consist of:

1) Certain features we see are structured in a way that precludes them having evolved gradually or in steps.

2) Some of these features are too complex to have evolved in their current forms as the result of a single mutation.

I agree with you that the definition he uses in 1) is flawed, but I also agree this is not a fatal problem. The alternate definitions you give are a little over my head with only two hours of sleep under me, but they seem reasonable. In fact, on some level irreducible complexity seems like a truism as long as we continue to believe that matter is not infinitely divisible.

However, my objection is with point 2). As far as I'm aware, Behe never gives a straight answer to the question of how complex is too complex. That's the part that stoops to the argument from personal incredulity.

In fact, given the preponderance of evidence in favor of evolution, I think the more reasonable position is the exact opposite of Behe's: any irreducibly complex feature we see in the real world should be presumed by default to be evidence of what is not too complex for mutation to explain. To say otherwise requires turning the entire field of biology on its head.

Jeremy
 
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