Are bacteria and viruses considered as irreducible complexities?

Question

Are bacteria and viruses considered as irreducible complexities?

Answer 1

In the creationist sense of things that are too complex in some unspecified way to have been produced by evolution?   No.

Examples meeting a rigorous definition of "irreducible complexity" (e.g. an arch) present no problem to being formed by gradual process (e.g.  wind or coastal erosion removing underlying material until an irreducibly complex arch remains).   The existence of irreducibly complex systems in living things is not evidence for creationism or against biology.  

Similarly, the existence of facts about reality that conflict with one or another religious text should not be taken as evidence for or against any particular god.   It's not necessary for bronze age poets to have gotten their system of the world correct for you to have faith. In addition to being bad science (or not science at all), creationism is also bad theology.

Answer 2

No.

Answer 3

No. And as technology advances things that had been thought to be so are revealed to not be. Take the Atom…

Answer 4

"Irreducible complexity" means that you can't remove a part of it without destroying its function. This seems to be the case with bacteria and viruses. They will, of course, be as simple as they possibly can (and still survive, of course). This is because they can reproduce more quickly if they have less genetic data.

However, "irreducible complexity" is usually heard in the context of the never-ending creationist-evolutionist debate, suggesting that evolution could not possibly have built up an organism little by little, since any less complex object will not be viable.

This argument is a logical fallacy. Saying that A and B both require each other's previous existence to function may seem plausible (e.g. the heart and the lungs), but... just because A can't function alone doesn't mean that there is no substitute for B. It could have been that we originally had the components A' and B', which are simpler versions of A and B, respectively. A' evolved to A, and was able to survive because B' was present. However, this organism would survive even better with B, so B' evolves to B. Or, it could happen that the difference between A and A' and the difference between B and B' are encoded on the same gene, so that A and B could have emerged at the same time.