According to an article in the new Discover, natural selection with random mutations CAN produce irreducible complexity!
Scientists at Caltech developed a program called AVIDA, an " auto-adaptive genetic system designed primarily for use as a platform in Digital or Artificial Life research". It generates a set of random programs in its language, and then makes copies of those programs that perform a particular task. The copies have a certain chance of random mutation. Researchers using this program to create a program that added two numbers found that it resulted in irreducibly complex programs (remove any line of code and it was completely nonfunctional) and beat the odds in doing so.
Comment