Over at Pharyngula PZ Myers has an excellent article about the use of the scala natura or “ladder of complexity”, as a metaphor for evolution. He argues that there’s no ladder, that a human being is not necessarily more complex than a fly and that the idea has obscured the argument against creationists. But the most interesting part is a discussion about how to define and measure complexity. It made me wonder if complexity is in fact an ontological property or just an epistemological one. In other words, is complexity an attribute of things or is it an attribute of knowledge, of how we see and understand things? A system that cannot be easily simulated is called complex, so its complexity seems to be based on the characteristics of the model. Although it looks that the complexity in the model is inferred from actual causal structures, it could also be that it is the result of the epistemological modeling process from which an apparent ontological complexity arises. Anyway, here’s PZ’s article in case you are interested:

Step away from that ladder

by PZ Myers

We've often heard this claim from creationists: "there is no way for genetics to cause an increase in complexity without a designer!". A recent example has been Michael Egnor's obtuse caterwauling about it. We, including myself, usually respond in the same way: of course it can. And then we list examples of observations that support the obviously true conclusion that you can get increases in genetic information over time: we talk about gene duplication, gene families, pseudogenes, etc., all well-documented manifestations of natural processes that increase the genetic content of the organism. It happens, it's clear and simple, get over it, creationists.

Maybe we've been missing the point all along, though. The premise of that question from the creationists is what they consider a self-evident fact: that evolution posits a steady increase in complexity from bacteria to Homo sapiens, the deep-rooted idea of the scala natura, a ladder of complexity from simple to complex. Their argument is that the ladder cannot be climbed, and our response is usually, "sure it can, watch!" when perhaps a better answer, one that is even more damaging to their ideology, is that there is no ladder to climb.

Complete article...

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