Behe's error was to assume that mutations could only add components, rather than modify existing components or alter their functions (or delete redundant components). A system that is useless for one function without a particular part may be useful for other functions. During the Dover Trial, Kenneth Miller wore a tie clip made from part of a mousetrap, to show that components from an "irreducibly complex" system could perform useful functions by themselves, even if that was not the same function as the completed system. Equally to the point, most components of complex molecular systems perform multiple functions; a mutation can make a component better at one function but worse at another, so that mutations can turn a redundantly complex system into a more efficient irreducibly complex system by altering components to be more specialized. All this was pointed out before Behe was born by the geneticist Hermann Mueller, who identified "irreducible complexity" (though he called it "interlocking complexity") as a likely outcome of Darwinian evolution, not an impossibility for such evolution. It is worth noting that some animals have blood that clots even though they don't have all the components of the mammalian blood-clotting cascade, and that some flagella work without all the components of the E. coli flagellum cited by Behe.
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