How do we make sense of the concept of irreducible complexity?

Here are the conclusions of a longer article by Peter Dunkelberg demystifying intelligent design. 

Conclusions

Irreducible complexity, intelligent design’s closest brush with biology, is marked by three ironies.

IC is supposed to be important because it cannot evolve. But it can evolve, in the same ways that anything else does.

Not one of the impressively complex biochemical systems said to be IC by IC/ID proponents has been shown to be in fact IC and several are known not to be. The known cases of IC are simpler and their evolution is understood.

Although the subject is religiously motivated, proponents have focused on bacterial flagella as the last hope for a highly complex IC system. This has the unintended consequence of making The Designer (aka God) responsible for serious diseases.

It is easy to see why scientists are not impressed by the claim that IC cannot evolve. IC is a matter of an observer specifying a combination of function, parts and system so that the specified function requires all the parts. There is no way for evolution to be sensitive to this, no way for it to matter at all. Nor does nature care about ‘direct’ vs ‘indirect’ evolution as perceived by us. Indirect evolution is as normal as tails on cows. Evolution merely requires populations with heritable variation. The processes of mutation, natural selection and random drift are not sensitive to whether a change will be deemed direct or not, nor whether a function, system and parts as specified by some observer are changing to meet the ‘all parts required’ condition.

There was supposed to be a special reason why it was impossible or at least very difficult for evolution to arrive at an ‘all parts required’ situation, but there is no such reason. The proposed reason was based on overlooking standard evolutionary processes and making analogies to manufactured items. Comparing Behe’s mousetrap to Venus’ flytrap confirms the reasonable suspicion that analogies and arguments based on manufactured items lead to underestimating nature. Since IC can occur in the ordinary course of events we have a known process, evolution, which is acting in the present and which given time is sufficient to produce the adaptations that Behe finds perplexing. This is like the raising of the Rocky Mountains; a known process acting in the present is sufficient, given time, to produce the result. Of course there is no way to predict all the details in either case, nor is it necessary.

Finally, this version of ‘gap theology’, basing the Designer on gaps or purported gaps in our knowledge (which is not mainstream religion), ends up implicating the Designer in human disease. This makes ID rather questionable as a public school lesson. Gap theology is bad enough at best, and always has the problem that the gaps keep getting smaller. This new version of it is especially bad. Darwin did theologians a favor by freeing them from this sort of thing.

Despite all this, there is a strong political drive to force public schools to misrepresent neocreationism as science. But misrepresentation is not acceptable. And it would be awkward to tell teachers to teach ID science when there isn’t any. If it becomes politically necessary to teach something about the subject, the present essay contains material for several lessons. And if the plan is to teach ‘the controversy’, it would be proper to tell the students that there is no scientific controversy, although there is a public one. Books like Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution are surely part of the reason. Yet the widespread public acceptance of Behe’s thesis is stark evidence that we need stronger science education, especially about evolution.