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Article Title:	Sir David Attenborough - "Why I Don't Mention God"
Author of reported comment:	Ray Ingles
Comment Date:	15:53 on Jan 24 2008
Comment:	I'm not actually familiar with any examples of 'irreducible complexity' that have held up under scrutiny. The clotting cascade, the bacterial flagellum - all turn out to be evolvable, and some precursors and details can even be found about the process. Here's an example you can partially test on your own body: Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex' - just Google around a bit.) It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils representing over 11 separate stages have been found. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.

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