Behe has responded to a complaint similar to yours. It seems, to me at least, to convincingly deal with what you’ve just said. I have copied it out here,
As it struggles to comprehend nature, science sometimes has to completely rethink how the world works. For example, Newton’s laws apply to everyday objects, but they can’t handle nature’s tiny building blocks. Propelled by this discovery, quantum mechanics overthrew Newton’s theory. Revolutions in biology have included the cell theory of life in the nineteenth century, as well as the slow realization in this century that cells are composites of enormously complex molecular systems.
Newton’s theory remains very useful, and we can still learn many things by studying whole animals or cells. When explaining the nuts and bolts of the world, however, those views must yield to more basic descriptions. A mechanical engineer can’t contradict a physicist on fundamental principles of life. It’s not a question of pride – that’s just the way the world works.
Curiously, some people seem offended by the way the world works. In his review of my book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution , evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr unexpectedly attempts to claim priority for his field. He grouses that pre-med students are required to take biochemistry but not evolutionary biology. He plaintively asks, “Why is everyone an expert witness when the topic is Darwinism but not when it’s biochemistry?” The obvious reply is that the evolution of biochemical systems is itself biochemistry . When a protein sequence changes, when DNA mutates, those are biochemical changes. Since inherited changes are caused by molecular changes, it is biochemists—not evolutionary biologists—who will ultimately decide whether Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection can explain life. No offense—that’s just the way the world works.
Orr hankers for the respect accorded physicists, and thinks evolutionary biologists can finally lay aside their “physics envy” because “we biologists have discovered the structure of DNA, broken the genetic code, sequenced the entire genome of some species.” Orr is like a podiatrist claiming credit for progress in brain surgery. Biochemistry made those dramatic advances; evolutionary biology played no part. I mean no disrespect, but this is not a minor academic turf war—the point is crucial. Anyone who wants to address questions about life’s basic mechanisms has to do so from a molecular perspective. Orr does not.
Declining the opportunity to address my biochemical arguments, Orr questions the concept of irreducible complexity on logical grounds. He agrees with me that “You cannot… gradually improve a mousetrap adding one part and then the next. A trap having half its parts doesn’t function half as well as a real trap; it doesn’t function at all.” So Orr understands the point of my mousetrap analogy—but then mysteriously forgets it. He later writes. “Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added, because helps A.” Some part initially does some job? Which part of the mousetrap is he talking about? A mouse has nothing to fear from a “trap” that consists of just an unattached holding bar, or spring, or platform, with no other parts.
These couple of quotes from Richard Feynman may also be illuminating,
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
