To poke fun at creationist Michael Behe's claim that a mousetrap is a good analogy for an "irreducibly complex" biochemical system, I have drawn mousetraps in several stages of reduced complexity.Trouble is, the mousetraps are not Behe's mousetrap and therefore have nothing to say to his analogy; they are also unworkable in the real world, as far as I can see. They thus give the evolutionary game away in that evolution works well as a story, but that's about it! Its relation to the real world is yet to be established.
McDonald has to establish how Behe's mousetrap can be reduced and remain workable, not propose completely other mousetraps...designed, of course.
To continue Behe's line, what McDonald has to do is establish how complex biological sub-systems can come about incrementally as working systems incomplete compared to the final system.
This has to be established biochemically, not story-wise in Darwinian fashion. That is, Darwin, and his followers are great story tellers (Dawkins and his 'eye' story is typical, and as easily rebutted). Their fiction is wonderful. But they establish nothing.
So, McDonald has to give us, firstly, a plausible biochemical explanation of the incremental development of a complex subsystem. Then he has to plausibly place this within a functional organism. Of course, at step two he can only fail. The putative organisms aren't around.
But even if he could do this, he's only established what could happen; not what did happen. We're still in story-land.
Then, to give evolution any legs at all, he's got to show that it did happen. I can tell that he'll point to the geological record. But for this to work as an explanation, he's got to do more than the gross morphology hoodwinking that we're used to and talk biochemistry! There's more, though. He's also got to step outside the circular non-logic of proving evolution by assuming it, and prove that the geological record is more than a sorted collection of dead creatures.
Too many problems, John, and finally we only have the superficial flippancy we've become used to from doctrinaire physicalists.
Nevertheless, thanks for the Stats text. Its great.
