The Mars Hill Club

Responding to Critics (Source: Essays ‘Is Irreducible Complexity (IC) Falsifiable?’ and ‘Blood Clotting Blues’ by Michael Behe from the Discovery Institute website, and some material from DBB)

a. Philosophical naturalism ('nuff said?)
b. Falsifiability (In proposing IC, are we ‘staking the deck’ and writing the rules such that we cannot be proved wrong?)
i. Contradictory argumentation
1. Critics have said it is not falsifiable,
2. Critics have also said it is falsifiable and they have evidence against it
ii. IC is open to direct experimental rebuttal, in other words, you can go into a lab and see if you can make these things happen through naturalistic processes
1. Take a Bacterial population with no motive power
2. Put selective pressure on the population
3. Run the population through hundreds of thousands of generations (easy to do with bacteria)
4. See if any motive system develops

c. Attacks on the blood clotting cascade example
i. Knock out mice
1. What are knock out mice?
a. Experiment with genetically modified mice
b. Two components of the blood clot cascade removed from the mice
2. What is the evolutionist claim re: knock out mice?
a. These mice were able to survive w/o the proteins
b. Therefore, the mammalian blood clotting cascade is not IC
3. Misinterpretation of the data
a. Mice with plasminogen ‘knocked out’ could not remove fibrin clots
i. High mortality
ii. Wasting
iii. Spontaneous gastrointestinal ulceration
iv. Rectal prolapse
v. Severe thrombosis (thrombic complications, sort of like the recent thing about long range air travel being bad for you)
vi. Delayed wound healing
b. Mice with fibrinogen ‘knocked out’ had problems with hemorrhaging
i. Failure to clot
ii. Frequent hemorrhaging
iii. Pregnancy resulted in uterine bleeding
c. Mice lacking both proteins had all the same problems as fibrinogen deficient mice
i. If the mice cannot make blood clots, then they cannot have the problems associated with plasminogen deficiency
ii. This is actually a proof in favor of the IC of the blood clotting cascade

ii. Gene Duplication
1. What is gene duplication?
a. Some proteins are quite similar to other proteins
i. Up to several hundred amino acid sequences are the same
ii. Very few differing amino acids between the two proteins
b. Somehow the gene for a particular protein is duplicated
c. Over time, the duplicated gene mutates
d. The mutant gene then provides the new protein
e. Natural selection then decides whether the animal containing the mutant protein passes it on to the next generation
2. How is this thought to counter IC?
a. The proteins in the blood clotting cascade have similar proteins in other biological structures
b. Therefore, the proteins in the blood clotting cascade could have arisen through gene duplication and natural selection
c. The blood clotting cascade is a ‘textbook example’ of gene duplication and domain swapping
i. Structural evidence
ii. Sequence evidence
3. What is the counter to the gene duplication argument?
a. Misses the point
i. Gene duplication relies on natural selection
1. Natural selection involves small steps
2. Each step must be beneficial to the organism
ii. The entire book ‘Darwins Black Box’ is a refutation of this concept
iii. No explanation is given of how natural selection can work with gene duplication
1. It is assumed that gene duplication is the answer
2. It is assumed that there is no need to understand the process in order for it be correct
3. (Hmm, can you say philosophical naturalism?)
b. The knock out mice prove that the incomplete system is not viable
c. Gene duplication is a proof of common descent not of natural selection
i. It is Behe’s belief that while natural selection is not true, common descent is true
ii. God provided intelligent design in molecular biological systems as opposed to the naturalistic process of mutation and natural selection