Through evolution. This is an excellent illustration of the flaws in Behe's arguments.

The article links Michael Behe's rebuttal. He makes a point in that some of the steps represent more than one change, and that the trap becomes nonfunctional while making the transition. Here's one example:

"The second mousetrap (above) has a spring and a platform. One of the extended arms stands under tension at the very edge of the platform. The idea is that if a mouse in the vicinity jiggles the trap, the end of the arm slips over the edge and comes rushing down, and may pin the mouse's paw or tail against the platform. Now, the first thing to notice is that the arms of the spring are in a different relationship to each other than in the first trap. To get to the configuration of the spring in the second trap from the configuration in the first, it seems to me one would have to proceed through the following steps (4): (1) twist the arm that has one bend through about 90* so that the end segment is perpendicular to the axis of the spring and points toward the platform; (2) twist the other arm through about 180* so the first segment is pointing opposite to where it originally pointed (the exact value of the rotations depend on the lengths of the arms); (3) shorten one arm so that its length is less than the distance from the top of the platform to the floor (so that the end doesn't first hit the floor before pinning the mouse). While the arms were being rotated and adjusted, the original one-piece trap would have lost function, and the second trap would not yet be working."

So essentially he is arguing about gaps in the Mousetrap fossil record? Hilarious! He picks at details while ignoring the key point: A mousetrap is not irreducibly complex.

This is hilarious, since even *if* mousetraps were irreducibly complex, it would prove nothing. Mousetraps did not arise by biological evolution, after all.

What a waste of an argument. It reminds me of the cartoon with the progression from fish to man coming out of the beach. It's the absense of any argument at all.

A mousetrap is an elegant design, which is why we have the saying about building a better one... Life itself is an elegant design. To miss that fact is absurd.

I still don't see a natural method of producing a mousetrap. Isn't he designing it?

Mousetraps did not arise by biological evolution, after all.

Well, this particular implementation didn't. Cats did...

My cat is desingned for sleeping, not mousing. It would be a pretty sad mouse to get caught by Jinx.

It would seem to me that the examples are either apples and apples or apples and ornages. Behe's whole point is that there is no known mechanism through which irreduciably complex organisms can arise naturally.

On second thought, forget the "known".

Lots of misunderstandings above.

1. Behe's rebuttal is not to the series of illustrations on the page, but to an earlier series. Behe and other IDers constantly revise the definition of irreducible complexity so as to avoid the truth that it's just an argument from lack of imagination.

2. The fact that the mousetrap didn't biologically evolve is irrelevant; the whole point of the exercise is to show that Behe's paradigm example of irreducible complexity, a mousetrap, is not, by his own definition.

3. ken anthony is right to say that there is no argument; the whole point, as above, is to provide a counterEXAMPLE (not counterargument) to Behe's definition of irreducible complexity. Behe says the mousetrap is irreducibly complex. It isn't. (Nor, as others have pointed out in painstaking detail, are any of the other examples he provides in his book.) It's ironic that ken takes a shot at the mousetrap example for lacking an argument when his entire argument appears to be "Mousetraps are elegantly designed and so is life, isn't that obvious?" That glass house looks awfully unstable there...

Scientific illiteracy is, at this point, to be expected from the ID zombies, but actual reading illiteracy comes as a surprise to me.

Behe's rebuttal is not to the series of illustrations on the page, but to an earlier series.

That's because the illustrations on the linked page were drawn in 2002 - see first paragraph here. Behe responded to the original drawings in a rebuttal dated July 31, 2000. McDonald revised the illustrations after the originals were criticised.

So essentially he is arguing about gaps in the Mousetrap fossil record? Hilarious! He picks at details while ignoring the key point: A mousetrap is not irreducibly complex.

Behe claims that a mousetrap is irreducibly complex. He presents sound arguments that the changes necessary in the evolutionary gaps would destroy the mousetrap's ability to trap mice - see the last sentence in the quote at the top of this thread.

I prefer the apples-to-apples comparisons, myself, but mousetrap illustration effectively communicates Behe's point: that certain biological characteristics cannot evolve from Point A to Point B without losing their Point A function. A mousetrap is easier to visualize than, say, the inner workings of the flagellum; I vaguely recall that IDers cite that as an irreducibly complex biological feature.

I don't follow ID theory, but it seems to assume that evolution is always going forward, that there is no two-steps-back-and-three-steps-forward movement. Hypothetically, evolutionary advances could break the "mousetrap" from time to time, with the "mousetrap" to return in a new, improved form in future speciation.

Mike Puckett: "My cat is desingned for sleeping, not mousing. It would be a pretty sad mouse to get caught by Jinx."

You have one of those as well? Our German Shepherd has caught more mice than the cat.

To be fair, she is nearly 18 now.

Still, I have only found evidence she has ever caught one mouse and I kinda think it may have died of natural causes and she just mauled the carcas to impress me.

The energy (food) surplus or deficit of a particular organism at any given point in time is not constant. Not in one lifetime, let alone over evolutionary time spans.

If I am a primitive micro organism living in a randomly very rich nutrient soup, with no current predators around to eat me, then I have all kinds of extra energy and time for non-fatal mutations to, over time, randomly coalesce into, oh, say the flaggelate structures oh so beloved by the IDers.

Now if food is tight and there are things that like to eat me around, me species isn't, not specifically then and there, going to probably be able to evolve flaggellate motion organs. But when such a random (in this example) confluence of the 3 required traits has taken place, and THEN, at a later time, the food is tight and predators appear, voila, soon ALL of this species has flaggellate motor organs.

It is the changing circumstances through time that DEFINE which traits have survival. It isn't a constant, and I maintain it is indeed a very poor imagination that allows the IDers to persist in their folly.

But when such a random (in this example) confluence of the 3 required traits has taken place, and THEN, at a later time, the food is tight and predators appear, voila, soon ALL of this species has flaggellate motor organs.

(The U. of California-Santa Barbara has an interesting page on bacterial flagellum here.)

McDonald's mousetrap analogy follows a different pattern: a primitive mousetrap evolves and undergoes radical change toward its late Holocene version. He failed to illustrate reducible complexity; his illustrations do not show gradual change, and thus do not show that the trap maintains functionality as the trap evolves.

As Paul Dietz stated, mousetraps are not biological phenomena. Furthermore, mousetraps are far simpler than flagella (three major components, many subcomponents), or other complex organs such as the eye. The applications of the mousetrap illustration are therefore quite limited.

Disproving the claim of irreducible complexity requires proving that no irreducibly complex organs exist. (Gee, ya think?) Proving that one reducibly complex organ exists (which McDonald didn't do) doesn't fulfill the task.

So what definition of "irreducible complexity" are we to use here? McDonald responded to this one:

"If any one of the components of the mousetrap (the base, hammer, spring, catch, or holding bar) is removed, then the trap does not function. In other words, the simple little mousetrap has no ability to trap a mouse until several separate parts are all assembled. Because the mousetrap is necessarily composed of several parts, it is irreducibly complex." (Behe, 1996).

OBVIOUSLY, it is ridiculous to bring mousetraps into a discussion about evolution, but Behe opened the door. Clearly, McDonald demonstrated by counterexample that the mousetrap can be radically simplified and still function. By Behe's definition, it is not irreducibly complex.

McDonald's mousetrap analogy follows a different pattern: a primitive mousetrap evolves and undergoes radical change toward its late Holocene version. He failed to illustrate reducible complexity; his illustrations do not show gradual change, and thus do not show that the trap maintains functionality as the trap evolves.

McDonald did not demonstrate an evolutionary process in his initial illustrations, he did demonstrate reducible complexity.

When Behe's argument was shown to be false, Behe changed the argument. It wasn't enough to show that this mechanical device could be simplified greatly and still function. Now you had to define the process. McDonald responded with his second humorous set of illustrations, and Behe's response was to pick at details. Obviously, in a few illustrations, you cannot demonstrate the evolutionary variations in a vast population of mousetraps over a period of thousands or millions of years. I have no doubt that no matter how far McDonald were to expand his illustrations, Behe would simply change the argument again, or point to some detail that McDonald had not fully explained. This is typical of Creationist argument.

When did Behe respond to the second set of illustrations? McDonald doesn't link a second rebuttal; he links only the rebuttal concerning the first set.