Uh, the Other Way, Dude

In the “That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means” sweepstakes, we have the following entry from author Mark Essig:

This Is Going to Hurt – New York Times

The Supreme Court may end up banning the cocktail, but such a ruling would only inspire state officials to mix up a new set of drugs. The new protocol may at first appear to work smoothly, but decades of executions have taught us this: Technical systems are prone to failure, and human bodies are irreducibly complex and idiosyncratic. Whatever the technique, executions will go horrifyingly wrong. [Emphasis added.]

Irreducible complexity implies that a system so-called is brittle and fails easily with removal of any component. If human bodies were irreducibly complex, there would be be no idiosyncracy concerning any of the components within the IC system, and effectively targeting any one of them would reliably cause the system to fail. IC-ness would make executions, even painless ones, easier to achieve, not harder. The observed phenomena Essig cites argue strongly that we cannot consider “human bodies” to be among the putative class of “irreducibly complex systems”.

Mark Essig, the business editor for The Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times, is the author of “Edison and the Electric Chair.”

Mr. Essig: it’s probably best not to use the branded jargon of the “intelligent design” creationism advocates, especially if one wishes to keep an appearance of talking knowledgeably about biological topics.

Hat tip to PT reader Daryl Cobranchi.