richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

W H Y r H E RE A 1. M O S T C F.RTAIN L Y I S N O G () I) 129
they simultaneously appear to shoot each other with pistols, and
each appears to catch the bullet in his teeth. Elaborate precautions
are taken to scratch identifying marks on the bullets before they are
put in the guns, the whole procedure is witnessed at close range by
volunteers from the audience who have experience of firearms, and
apparently all possibilities for trickery are eliminated. Teller's
marked bullet ends up in Penn's mouth and Penn's marked bullet
ends up in Teller's. I [Richard Dawkins] am utterly unable to think
of any way in which this could be a trick. The Argument from
Personal Incredulity screams from the depths of my prescientific
brain centres, and almost compels me to say, 'It must be a miracle.
There is no scientific explanation. It's got to be supernatural.' But
the still small voice of scientific education speaks a different
message. Penn and Teller are world-class illusionists. There is a
perfectly good explanation. It is just that I am too naive, or too
unobservant, or too unimaginative, to think of it. That is the proper
response to a conjuring trick. It is also the proper response to a
biological phenomenon that appears to be irreducibly complex.
Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural
phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are
no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and
leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'.
In his book Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, the Scottish
chemist A. G. Cairns-Smith makes an additional point, using the
analogy of an arch. A free-standing arch of rough-hewn stones and
no mortar can be a stable structure, but it is irreducibly complex: it
collapses if any one stone is removed. How, then, was it built in the
first place? One way is to pile a solid heap of stones, then carefully
remove stones one by one. More generally, there are many
structures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survive
the subtraction of any part, but which were built with the aid of
scaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longer
visible. Once the structure is completed, the scaffolding can be
removed safely and the structure remains standing. In evolution,
too, the organ or structure you are looking at may have had
scaffolding in an ancestor which has since been removed.
'Irreducible complexity' is not a new idea, but the phrase itself
was invented by the creationist Michael Behe in 1996. 62 He is