You’ve probably heard the phrase “Irreducible Complexity” before. It often comes up in discussions about evolution, creation, and intelligent design. The idea is that there exists a feature of some living creature that is designed in such a way that it could not have come into being strictly by chance.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine there’s an organ that consists of three distinct parts. None of the parts would be valuable on its own (where “valuable” means it would provide some advantage to the organism that would lead to this particular mutation being passed on). No combination of two of the parts are valuable. Therefore, there’s no reason why the organ should have arisen by chance – all three parts would have to have sprung into being simultaneously.

Every example of irreducible complexity that I’ve heard of in the past has been countered with arguments (and, in some cases, specific examples from the fossil record) that show that, indeed, there was an advantage to some subset of the parts.

The concept doesn’t apply only to discussions about evolution, though. It also applies to politics. Just in the last few months, we can look at the stimulus package, Waxman-Markey, and the House’s Health Care reform bill. Each of these bills is monstrously huge, so much so that I would wager that not even a tenth of the individuals who voted on them were able to read the entirity of what they were voting on.

What’s the sense in that? Are these issues really so complex that the bills couldn’t be split up, passed in subsets that would make sense and still have the desired effect^[a]? President Obama keeps telling us that there are aspects of the Health Care bill that will save us a great deal of money, so why not go after those aspects alone first? Why do we have to put the entire overhaul together into one unthinkably massive, incomprehensible bill?

My belief is that the size of these bills has nothing to do with irreducible complexity, but rather that the size is more closely related to the fact that it’s easier to hide distasteful things in bills that few people will ever read.

1. That’s assuming, of course, that one thinks that the ultimate goal of the bills is desirable. [↩]