Ted,
Thank you for the article. I am not particularly interested in the socio-political matters you’ve written about, simply because I’ve personally grown a little tired of it. Constructive debate on those issues is often non-existent; consequently my desire to get involved in those topics comes and goes. I am however very interested in the science and reasoning behind the ID argument. You and I had a couple of brief conversations a few years ago (on another matter) and I appreciated then your respectful interaction with me, and I appreciate now the even-handedness of several comments in this article. I would like to directly address one empirical issue though.
About irreducible complexity, you write:
This, however, only begs the question of whether or not ID advocates are right about the inadequacy of Darwinian mechanisms to explain things like the bacterial flagellum.
I’ve spent the last seven years researching the scientific literature on the topic of semiosis in the cell. Specifically, I was attempting to inventory all the physical conditions required for one object to represent another object in a material universe (where no object inherently represents anything whatsoever). This issue goes directly to the informational aspects of biology, which is the part of design theory that interested me most.
The long and the short of it is this; irreducible complexity was the farthest thing on my mind as I researched semiosis, but I found that the core argument of irreducible complexity is completely and unambiguously confirmed by the study of semiosis in the cell. In the starkest terms possible, IC is not merely a speed bump for evolutionary accounts, it is the only thing that allows evolutionary accounts to exist in the first place. Moreover, among researchers of semiosis (particularly those within the physics domain) this fact of irreducibility has been acknowledged and written about for years.
Very briefly, the organization of the heterogeneous living cell is only made possible by the translation of an informational medium into physical effects – and that process is not physically possible without one set of objects serving as an informational medium, and another set of objects establishing what is being represented. These two sets of objects have been clearly identified in the cell (i.e. nucleic codons and their cognate aaRS). The defining attribute of the system is that it can only function if the medium is specifically organized as a genuine representation (which has also been clearly identified). This architecture creates a set of relationships in the operation of the genetic system, and these relationships are what we now call the Genetic Code.
If you are not quite following what I am describing, I’ve put the issue into easy terms and published it on a website, Biosemiosis.org. I would encourage anyone interested in these issues to peruse it there.
There is one other extraordinary finding that cannot go unnoticed. To a physicist, a system such as this is entirely unique in the physical world, and is completely identifiable among all other physical systems. This specific system has only been identified in one other instance anywhere else in the cosmos. That instance is in recorded language and mathematics – two unambiguous correlates of intelligence. The intractable fact of the matter is that the singularly-unique physical conditions required for this system – which would ostensibly not exist on Earth until the rise of an advanced intelligence – were completely evident at the very origin of life. They are the physical means by which the cell becomes organized.
It is also notable that none of these material observations are even controversial. Perhaps over the course of the next years these physical realities will become more widely known.
– Also, you might enjoy a different perspective on Behe’s legacy of irreducible complexity, Here.