Irreducible Complexity Cut Down to Size

Unless you live in hillbilly territory, it's difficult nowadays to be a creationist and not get immediately laughed at. So, what do you do if you believe in the half-baked idea that some designer designed biological organisms as they are? You dress it up with sophisticated-sounding technical terms like 'irreducible complexity', and you also make sure to surround its mention with liberal-sounding principles like tolerance of other views, teaching the controversy, keeping an open mind, or even --and this is as ridiculous as it can possibly get-- letting the children decide, as if empirical knowledge were a question of personal preference or popularity...

The fact is, however, that once you strip the intention behind irreducible complexity (lest you commit the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy), the idea, fancy as it may originally sound, is still ultimately nothing more than an argument from personal incredulity: taking your own inability to explain a phenomenon or process, or your lack of imagination, or simply your ignorance of the scientific literature, as the basis upon which to pretend to have found an answer that's just conveniently consistent with your religious beliefs.

And when it comes to evidence, even the examples shown by its proponents turn out, surprise surprise, not to be irreducibly complex...

And just remember that if you want to draw an analogy between a human designer and god as a designer, logical consistency requires that in both cases the designers must be more complex than their designs, in which case you'd be 'explaining' complexity by presupposing even more complexity.

Call me silly, but 'solving' a mystery with a bigger mystery only aggravates the problem, it doesn't solve it...

And if you're interested, here is a description of the self-assembly of the bacterial flagellum.

Update: QualiaSoup, the creator of this and other wonderful animations, has also produced a response to 'objections' creationists have voiced against his portrayal of irreducible complexity:

As one commenter said, you don't fuck with QualiaSoup :)
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