Oh No! I've Seen the Impossible! My Eyes!

Ah, the things you learn from creationists... If you've ever read about intelligent design (a k a "the progeny of creationism"), you've probably encountered their favorite buzz words, "irreducible complexity." If you take a piece out of a complex biological system (like the cascade of blood-clotting proteins) and it fails to work, this is taken as evidence that the system could not have evolved. After all, without all the pieces in place, it couldn't work. Scientists have shown over and over again that this is a false argument. At the famous intelligent-design trial in Dover in 2005, Pennsylvania, for example, Brown biologist Ken Miller showed how dolphins and other species are missing various proteins found in our blood-clotting cascade, and they can still clot blood. (Here's Miller on Youtube giving a lecture on the experience--the blood starts to clot at 39:00.) Three years later, the creationists are still trying to ...