Can't ID be tested AT ALL?

I'm shocked as well as surprised, how could anyone trying to argue for ID so totally fail to comprehend the difference between 'complexity' and 'irreducible complexity'.Come to that I'm shocked by the woeful lack of reading comprehension that somehow led you to in any way take from what Ramoss wrote that cells were not complex or that any oversimplification was being practiced.TTFN,WK

The main problem is that depending upon which definition is being followed Irreducible complexity itself can either allow or disallow normal evolutionary pathways.The initial definition by Michael Behe, 'By irreducibly complex I mean a single system which is composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.', is a perfectly usable definition and while it has a degree of subjectivity is probably quite sufficient for most people to agree on a number of things as being IC. The problem for the ID camp is that Behe's original definition has nothing to say about the evolvability of such systems. Behe uses their existence as an argument for another mechanism to be involved, but gives no compelling reason why already understood evolutionary mechanisms are not perfectly sufficient.William Dembski then redefined IC in terms of his own concept of Specified Complexity and redefines it in such a way as to rule out plausible evolutionary pathways.So we have two different froms, one which can be used but is useless and one which is not useless but is completely unusable relying as it does on numbers Dembski seems to have effectively made up off the top of his head and the ability to eliminate all natural evolutionary mechanisms as the source of the complexity, which seems rather redundant since if he could do that he wouldn't need to make an argument from SC/IC.I don't think your system would produce a way of studying IC by either of these definitions. Your eventual minimal cell might be IC as Behe defines it but it doesn't preclude prior simpler forms the vital components of which have since disappeared from the genome.TTFN,WK

The problem is that the momentum for such a definition must come from the ID camp. Those arguing for evolution cannot force the pro-ID movement to accept their definitions.Until those who claim to be interested in properly researching ID actually start coming up with both usable and useful definitions and actually doing something resembling science then there will be no scientific evidence for ID to discuss.At least Michael Behe has attempted, with his paper in collaboration with Snoke (Snoke and Behe, 2004), to produce a proper scientific approach to the question he wants to study. It is perhaps unfortunate for him that the research actually pointed out that his premise was incorrect and that the evolution of multiresidues protein features was in fact quite possible given a moderately large population, provided that realistic values were fed into his simulations in the first place.TTFN,WK

That is what it means. But the initial figures plugged into the simulation to get those values were unrealistic, if you replace them with more realistic assumptions then you get much more tenable values. It is also worth bearing in mind that many of the fundamental functional protein domains are already present in species which have populations well in excess of 10^9 so it may be that you are much less likely to see the development of truly novel in long generation small population organisms, but that is entirely in line with what you would expect from a standard neo-darwinian view anyway.TTFN,WK

So its complex, and?You seem to have answered Ramoss's meta question in that you can't answer his actual question, still. You are making the same mistake you were making last month. Do you not think it might be worth your while finding out what the distinction is between 'complexity' and 'irreducible complexity'(IC), if you plan to base your arguments on IC.TTFN,WK