EXPLAIN THIS: The ‘Irreducible Complexity’ Of The Elephant’s Trunk
Screen shot from “The Elephant’s Trunk,” produced by the John 10:10 Project.
Elephants never forget because they are extremely intelligent. Carthaginian General Hannibal crossed the Alps with a bunch of war elephants that he then used to confront the Roman Legion. There would be no circus without elephants. Those three statements likely exhaust what most people know about this giant.
But there is something else about elephants that makes them genuinely incredible creatures and that is their trunks. As the following 8:13 video produced by the John 10:10 Project beautifully and compellingly explains, the elephant’s trunk is amazingly complicated, exquisitely capable and among the prime examples in nature of the concept of “Irreducible Complexity.”
Biochemist Michael Behe is the best-known modern advocate of IC, which he defined in his landmark book “Darwin’s Black Box” as “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”