The nucleus went down to the cities to consume a Michael Behe lecture, popsci level, on I.D. It was interesting, fairly good, but the crowd was too big and dense to engage with the speaker. Which is a pity, really, because I think I have some insights into his “irreducible complexity”, it’s role in I.D., and philsophical import. I suppose I should email him.

Irreducible complexity is evidence of intelligent design, in as much as evolutionary processes can’t really come up with a system that has a discontinuous fitness function, and does not admit hill-climbing optimization. Fair enough. But I think the flaw in this argument is that it assumes a single fitness function. If fitness functions are sufficiently dense, even if all of the fitness functions in play have vanishingly low probability of finding a satisficer, the plenitude of functions as an ensemble may have a very high probability of finding one.

For any given fitness function, such as that for a flagellum, Behe’s very excellent example, the mathematics seem achievable, to demonstrate the (very low) probability of spontaneous generation. Demonstrating the structure of the function space, and the variety of fitness functions which are of potential interest in it, is a very, very hard problem in comparison. Perhaps so hard that this whole line of thought is a practical dead-end. But at least it brings some architectonic light to the theory.