Comments on "irreducible complexity"

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Gosh, how come the creationists haven't spotted this one?

History has built irreducible complexity and variety into the bounteous world of organisms.

(Emphasis mine.) Of course, what Stephen Jay Gould meant by that phrase, in his essay "Red wings in the sunset", has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what Michael Behe meant when he used the same phrase several years later. Gould meant only that the world is too complicated to be fully described by simple "monistic" schemes like Abbott H Thayer's theory that all animal colouration serves the purpose of camouflage.

(Gould's essay appears in "Bully for Brontosaurus", published in 1991; it first appeared in 1985 in Natural History magazine. "Darwin's black box" was published in 1996. I wonder whether Behe had read Gould.)