I think it explains some things about the situation but I'm always wary of taking the stance that we fully understand something. Would you say irreducible complexity is a myth/misunderstanding?

Nightgaunt's link goes much further, but I'd just say it's generally a logical fallacy-- a variant of the argument from ignorance. Behe's strategy is to look at the diversity of life, find things we don't understand, and conclude "We do not understand the development of _________, therefore evolution is false, and therefore a Designer did it." (One of the more prominent 'textbooks' of Intelligent Design was discovered to be a Creationist textbook, simply modified to remove references to 'God' and replace them with 'a Designer'.)

It's also referred to as the 'god of the gaps' argument. The joke is that every time a scientist confirms an intermediate species or function between A and Z, that just creates two new gaps! Behe's tried to nail down a few specific examples, but:

1) They get refuted, at which point he adopts the 'moving goalposts' strategy-- just name another difficult problem and claim that one means evolution is false. Nightgaunt's link has several specific examples worth reading, but a number of systems previously named 'irreducibly complex' turned out to have useful functions as parts before the whole came together.

2) He's stopped doing so in peer-reviewed primary journals. Anyone can print whatever they like in a book or editorial, but primary studies have to go through a rigorous process of verification before publication. Worse, if the claims are later found to be untrue, the journal editors will issue a formal retraction. If Behe and cohorts had real data, they wouldn't be fighting their case in the media and the Barnes & Noble.

The human mind, for instance, is a finely and perfectly tuned device of intricate complexity which we have a cursory - at best - understanding of. As such, I'm not comfortable declaring that the Darwin theory is the final word on how it came about and the essence of life in general. More importantly though, I'm not confident we can absolutely say we can state how it came about without understanding how it works.

It's not true that we don't know how it came about. There's a unbroken line of ancestral data from simple clumps of nerve cells up through the development of the spinal cord through a host of increasingly clever mammals, including us. There are proteins and structures shared all the way up the line, gradually being modified and complemented as the system increases in overall complexity.

It's also not true that the human brain is 'perfectly tuned'. There's a huge variation in performance, and there's no reason to believe our brains are optimal for anything even when healthy. Any number of brains turn on themselves to malfunction or die due to cancer, epilepsy, or other maladies. And given how important the brain is, why do we protect it only with a thin skull, and why are we so susceptible to concussions and other trauma? There are a number of functions that are jury-rigged kludges over simpler ways to do things, simply because your body has to work with the genes it inherits.

Read more examples of imperfect design here: http://talkorigins.org/faqs/jury-rigged.html

A generation ago, people didn't invoke the brain-- they invoked the eye. The problem is, over the past few decades we've pieced together the full function of the eye, along with the fact that not only can we show the path along which it evolved, but that eyes of some form evolved several times, independent of one another. (The selective pressure for even rudimentary vision over the wavelength illuminated by the sun is tremendous.) So again the goalposts move, and now it's in vogue to invoke the brain.

At the end of the day, I'm not a professional in the evolution field. I've read a great deal, and at least part of my university background covers it somewhat well, but it's not my core competency. Still, I probably have studied it more than 99% of people, and I readily admit there's quite a bit I don't know.

Nonetheless, I see a massive group of scientists publishing detailed study after detailed study confirming and refining the precepts of evolution. Their opposition is a hodgepodge of popular science, blogs, and editorials claiming only that because all of the branches of the tree of life haven't been mapped, evolution is wrong. I'm failing to see evidence against evolutionary theory-- specifically, challenges that remain unexplained despite intensive efforts, or better yet positive evidence for an alternative theory. (Strictly speaking, disproving Darwinian evolution would do nothing to prove Intelligent Design or Creationism.)

For me to claim that all the experts are wrong simply because I personally don't understand everything would be more than a bit arrogant.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com