Venus Mousetrap
Posts: 201
Joined: Aug. 2007
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| Quote (Zachriel @ Nov. 07 2008,11:14) | | Quote | | O'Leary: Evolution does and does not predict irreducible complexity, and anyway it doesn’t exist … |
The problem is that there is more than one definition of Irreducible Complexity, which leads to different answers depending which one is being used.
| Quote | Michael 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. (Darwin's Black Box, 39)
William Dembski's Enhanced Definition:
A system performing a given basic function is irreducibly complex if it includes a set of well-matched, mutually interacting, nonarbitrarily individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system's basic, and therefore original, function. The set of these indispensable parts is known as the irreducible core of the system. (No Free Lunch, 285)
Michael Behe's "Evolutionary" Definition
An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway. |
Consider a system A and a helper B. If A and B evolve such that the function becomes dependent on B, then the system A1-B1 meets Behe's Original Definition, but not Behe's Evolutionary Definition. Or a system A which duplicates to A-A, each of which then migrate to the functional poles A1-A2, again becoming dependent on one another.
(I responded to this on Mike Gene's blog, but it said I had to be logged in to comment.) |
I actually came up with my own kind-of definition, but I've yet to implement it.
Take a system S with N parts.
Score S's function according to some fitness function.
Now iterate through all the scores for all systems with N-1 parts. Obviously, many of these will be broken if you've removed a critical piece, so you'll end up with a table of scores ranging from total fail to maybe not broken that much. The measure of fail would be
Fail = how crap it scores now/how it originally scored
and goes from 0 to 1.
Now, Behe's definition seems to be that an IC system will end up with a table full of fail (because removing any bit breaks it), so the mean fail would be close to 0 for IC systems.
This is of course hard to do in real life; I was intending it for evolutionary algorithms where it'd be very easy to remove parts and calculate the score hundreds of times.
Then, of course, I remembered that ID is a scam so they would evade it with rhetoric if it actually worked.
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