Methinks it is sort-of like two weasels

[lee_merrill]

@Paul_King

It is not billed as or intended to be a simulation of biological evolution and Dawkins says that it is not accurate as such.

But I was responding to people here defending it.

@Paul_King

@lee_merrill

“An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway.” (Behe here)

That is certainly not a definition of design. Nor can it be considered evidence of design. After all, unselected steps will occur (quite frequently) and evolution is hardly going to care about whether it is including unselected steps or not.

This is definitely a definition for design, you may say it doesn’t work, but it’s still a definition. But unselected steps are indeed more difficult to get through, and the more such steps there are in a row, the exponentially more difficult it is for evolution to get through them. Let’s say each step is probability .1 to get through, then two such steps would be .01 probability, and three such steps would be .001 probability, etc.