The Final Adventures of the Blind Locksmith

On Thursday I wrote about a new paper reporting the reconstruction of a 450-million year old hormone receptor, and experiments indicating how it evolved into two receptors found in living vertebrates such as ourselves. On Friday I took a look at the initial response to the paper from intelligent design advocates at the Discovery Insitute. They claim that there exist biological systems that show "irreducible complexity," which could not possibly have evolved. In response to the new research, intelligent design advocates claimed that hormones and their receptors do not actually make the cut as irreducibly complex systems. But to do so, they had to ignore their own published definition of irreducible complexity. As I mentioned on Friday, the Discovery Institute promised more, and more they have delivered. Not scientific papers published in peer reviewed scientific journals, of course, but a lot of press releases and such. There's a lot to wade through as of Sunday evening, and no doubt even more to come. But none of it amounts to much. They spend a lot of time rehashing their claim that irreducible complexity is not touched by this research. And they also use another standard strategy: raising doubts about whether a particular evolutionary scenario could take place, or whether biologists have done enough work to make their case. It's odd in a way, that they should go to these lengths. For one thing, they repeatedly claim that the whole experiment has nothing to do with irreducible complexity. For another, they dismiss this evolutionary change as minor stuff that they have no trouble with.