The Lavalle Treaty (Reducible Simplicity)

 Steven Lavalle,  a computer programmer and one of the usual suspects from my good ole' facebook days,  has offered an interesting rebuttal to an article written by ID enthusiast, Dennis Jones, regarding "Irreducible Complexity":

"When you are testing a hypothesis, you have to account for the other ways the condition you are testing could have come about. For a sequence of bases or amino acids, you can add one at a time to a chain, you can take one at a time away from a longer chain, you can join chains together, you can split the middle out of a chain, or you can join a bunch of chains together at the same time.

Any one of these processes could produce a chain out of which you could knock one element and have a non-functioning molecule.

Which, if any, of those processes is the one that is predicted by a model of irreducible complexity?

#2 on the CONFIRM side is not possible to show without exhausting all of the possible pathways. #1 on the CONFIRM side seems to be short some possible ways that the irreducibly complex structure can form, which directly affects how you go about showing #2 on the FALSIFY side of the equation. For #1 on the FALSIFY side, what about on the gain of a protein?

And what about the possibility of trading segments of proteins? I doubt that even Michael Behe supports this idea any longer. I think he has changed the definition."

First of all ---  the definition of IC has remained unchanged since it's initial citation in Behe's 1996 book: "Darwin's Black Box",  therefore Lavalle's assertion that it has somehow "changed"  is really nothing more than an unfounded strawman. 

My personal assumption is that Mr. Lavalle generally misunderstands the intended point of the IC hypothesis, which is to highlight the fact that specific complex systems are not physically "REDUCIBLE" to a "Stepwise Darwinian Pathway".    IC has absolutely nothing to do with "reducing a system to individual parts", as all designed systems are reducible to individual parts.  Why wouldn't they be?

IC is a fairly simple concept (not intended to be applied to everything under the sun), but rather to specifically address the Darwinist position that complex systems will arise over time due to "NS acting on Random Mutations" -- and the IC hypothesis has held up quite well  for 18 years.

Genetic Drift was never intended to be addressed here, as GD (in it's simplest form) would basically mean that a complex "outboard motor" just randomly falls together over millions of years for no particular reason and THEN (because an outboard motor is a good thing to have) it gets "Naturally selected for".    

There are plenty of legitimate reasons as to why this position is absurd, but again, IC has nothing to do with addressing Genetic Drift and was never intended to do so.

Co-Option is another handwave which is more directly relevant to the IC hypothesis and most ID proponents would agree that exaptation most likely plays a strong role in the construction of new complex systems (such as the flagellar). There is no real dispute on this issue, but the problem for the Darwinists is that "Co-Option" is typically an "action" associated 100% with Intelligent agents and the idea that "evolution" somehow randomly "Co-opts" parts and then reshapes them and re-organizes them into a brand new, sophisticated, complex system is as equally absurd as claiming "Outboard motors randomly fall together given enough time".  Evidence, please?

All of this is fairly easy to comprehend...

...which begs the question: "Why does Steven Lavalle avoid comprehending it?"The obvious answer is most likely Dogma and Bias on his part as an admitted "ID skeptic".