Sean Carroll replied to an essay written by Paul Nelson concerning George Ellis' recent essay . And if responses continue , these descriptions will look like Rube Goldberg machines

Sean Carroll's beef with Paul Nelson is that the term "irreducible complexity" is incomprehensible (at least to him, he thinks it means evolution is impossible, a stronger argument than even Behe gave to it!) so:

So it would be strange to find a real scientist talk about "irreducible higher-level causation." But then you look at Ellis's essay and — he doesn't! The word "irreducible" doesn't appear anywhere in the article. Nelson kind of insinuated it into the text.

I found it quite obvious that Ellis was referring to an irreducible higher level in his essay in Nature . But I guess this could be settled if we actually did find the term in the context of his essay, and you can find it in a longer version of his essay here :

The higher-level explanations rely on the existence of the lower level explanations in order that they can succeed, but are clearly of a quite different nature than the lower level ones, and are certainly not reducible to them nor dependent on their specific nature. The bottom-up kind of explanation would not apply to a specific context if the higher-level explanations, the result of human intentions, had not created a situation that made it relevant.

Nonetheless, enjoy the rest of Ellis' article, it's much better than the shortened version in Nature.

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