Michael Flannery commented yesterday on Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller’s claim to have refuted a major argument for intelligent design. How? By using a mousetrap as a tie clip.

The idea is that Miller’s tie clip purportedly demonstrates that Michael Behe’s example of the mousetrap as an irreducibly complex (IR) apparatus (comparable in this respect to the bacterial flagellum with its own IR design) fails by a simple analogy. In other words, what we see now as a complete bacterial flagellum might well have served a different function in an earlier form.

The question comes down to engineering, doesn’t it? For that, a biologist can speak only in an amateur’s role. Our reader Dean Bruckner in Ohio, who teaches industrial and systems engineering, turns it right around at Miller.

What Miller has demonstrated in his tie clip argument is actually an aspect of intelligent design: reuse of one component in another design. Applying something in this way takes both intelligence and intent. Engineers do this, sometimes in a premeditated and, systematic way, but at other times only after an unexpected moment of illumination. But in every case, intelligence is what lifts this new "signal" of function from the noise.

You’re right about the mass of any object creating a second "function." Anything that weighs a few pounds or more can serve as a doorstop, but when complex items such as a computer laptop serve as a doorstop, it is only because at least one intelligence has intelligently recognized the changed economic value of a non-operating computer, created a room, learned to use a door, acted on a desire to keep the door open, and created a new capability in a simple machine (friction and mass to exert a horizontal force) to get the job done. Repurposing requires purposing in the first place, and is no easier in either direction.

It sounds as if Miller himself has repurposed a piece of flotsam from the wreck of Darwinism, and is clinging to it with all his might.

I love the last line. Professor Bruckner is also a retired Coast Guard officer, so he has seen his share of flotsam.