36. Michael J. Katz, Templets and the explanation of complex patterns, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

36. Michael J. Katz, Templets and the explanation of complex patterns , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

The first usage of the term “irreducibly complex” in the scientific literature was not due to Michael Behe of Lehigh University (although Behe certainly put his stamp on the term, and has given it wide currency). Ten years before Darwin’s Black Box was published, the theoretical biologist Michael J. Katz of Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio) published an eight chapter scientific monograph with Cambridge University Press, entitled Templets and the Explanation of Complex Patterns (1986). In that publication, “irreducible complexity” occurs as an index entry, and is explained in the text as follows:

In the natural world, there are many pattern-assembly systems for which there is no simple explanation. There are useful scientific explanations for these complex systems, but the final patterns that they produce are so heterogeneous that they cannot effectively be reduced to smaller or less intricate predecessor components. As I will argue in Chapters 7 and 8, these patterns are, in a fundamental sense, irreducibly complex...(pp. 26-27) 

In context, it is abundantly clear that by “irreducible complexity,” Katz refers essentially to the same phenomena as does Behe. “For some natural phenomena,” he writes, “there simply is no reduction to smaller predecessors. In these cases, the companion rule to ‘order stems from order’ is that ‘complexity stems from complexity’” (p. 90). More fully: 

...the unique characteristics of organisms are pattern characteristics. The first of these fundamental pattern characteristics is complexity. Cells and organisms are quite complex by all pattern criteria. They are built of heterogeneous elements arranged in heterogeneous configurations, and they do not self-assemble. One cannot stir together the parts of a cell or of an organism and spontaneously assemble a neuron or a walrus: to create a cell or an organisms one needs a preexisting cell or a preexisting organism, with its attendant complex templets. A fundamental characteristic of the biological realm is that organisms are complex patterns, and, for its creation, life requires extensive, and essentially maximal, templets. (p. 83) 

Like Behe, Katz confronts the issue of the origin of life, and the dilemma raised for reductive or naturalistic explanation by the complexity of even the simplest organisms: 

Today’s organisms are fabricated from preexisting templets -- the templets of the genome and the remainder of the ovum [egg] -- and these templets are, in turn, derived from other, parent organisms. The astronomical time scale of evolution, however, adds a dilemma to this chain-of-templets explanation: the evolutionary biologist presumes that once upon a time organisms appeared when there were no preexisting organisms. But, if all organisms must be templeted, then what were the primordial inanimate templets, and whence came those templets? (pp. 65-66) 

The parallels between Katz’s argument, and those of design theorists such as Michael Behe, William Dembski, or Stephen Meyer, are so numerous and striking that if one did not know better, one might assume that a design theorist had written this (and dozens of other such passages in Katz’s book): 

Self-assembly does not fully explain the organisms that we know; contemporary organisms are quite complex, they have a special and an intricate organization that would not occur spontaneously by chance. The ‘universal laws’ governing the assembly of biological materials are insufficient to explain our companion organisms: one cannot stir together the appropriate raw materials and self-assemble a mouse. Complex organisms need further situational constraints and, specifically, they must come from preexisting organisms. This means that organisms -- at least contemporary organisms -- must be largely templeted. (p. 65) 