The Beehive and Irreducible Complexity

 

Wherever we look, we observe the marvels of this universe. Bruce Malone just reported on the marvel of the communication of bees:

·       Animals communicate with each other using a wide variety of methods. It has long been recognized that bees use an intricate dance that conveys the direction and distance to food sources. It has recently been discovered that bees also communicate using scents. Beehives are full of scents, yet honeybees are constantly alert to bees who are not members of the hive. Invaders to a hive are killed if they do not have exactly the same scent as the rest of the hive.

 

Entomologists (scientists that study insects) have discovered that all members of an individual hive learn to produce exactly the same chemical password…Bees from each hive can instantly tell whether a bee carries that hive’s specific chemical password. When bees start a new hive, they develop a new distinctive chemical password! (Search for the Truth; truth@searchforthetruth.net

 

This phenomenon highlights the principle of Irreducible Complexity (IC). Against Darwinian evolution, which argues that evolution must occur gradually – each mutation conferring a survival advantage – IC argues that many changes or structures must already be in place before any survival advantage can be realized.

 

The bees not only need to generate their hive-specific scents, they must also be able to distinguish among the scents, recognize those who do not carry their hive scent, recognize their threat to the hive, and then take the  appropriate action against the invaders, even to change their group scent in unison when the need arises. To merely generate this consistent common scent is not enough. For this to confer a survival advantage for the hive, these many other features must also be in place.

 

With good reason, some argue that every adaptive structure is IC. This argues strongly in favor of the Design Hypothesis and against the theory of evolution.