Communication is something that we can easily take for granted, and yet this pervasive attribute of living things represents bedrock evidence for intelligent design.

Communication, to be effective, always includes three features.

1. Expression
2. Reception
3. Comprehension

Effective communication necessitates and relies upon the operation of all three features. A lack of any one of these causes communication to fail. In short, effective communication is irreducibly complex.

When we refer to communication, we usually imagine people talking and listening, or someone reading what another has written, or maybe we’re listening to a music performance. Beyond ourselves, however, communication saturates the animal kingdom in myriads forms. Insects also communicate. Even within biological organisms, at the cellular level, communication forms an integral part of sustaining our physical being.

The Example of Blood Pressure

For instance, the physiology controlling blood pressure within our circulatory system utilizes all three features of communication. Complex hormonal chemicals, such as epinephrin and angiotensin, when emitted, interact with sensors and receptors throughout our bodies to regulate blood pressure and maintain it within required tolerances. Communication occurs unconsciously, but without it, we’d go unconscious!

Let’s look in more detail at the form of communication we’re most familiar with — human speech. Creating sounds with vocal chords, pharynx, tongue, mouth, and lips is just the first step in the communication process. The multitasking capabilities of the pharynx have been highlighted in a previous post by Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann.

The pharynx affords us the dual abilities to breathe and swallow food and water, but it does much more. It affords the ability for speech, language, and tonal activities like lyrical speech and singing. The percussion and acoustic shaping of the tongue, teeth, throat, oral and nasal cavities, and most of the other parts of the pharynx, are absolutely required for the nuanced communication that’s essential to the human experience.

All the coordinated anatomy that allows us to form sounds corresponding to words would be wasted and in vain if we didn’t also possess a marvelously attuned sense of hearing. Even a cursory description of the delicate structures of the ear required for us to hear sounds over a thousand-fold range of acoustic vibrations reveals intricately interrelated details surpassing human engineering abilities. 

More than Anatomy

And yet, hearing is much more than anatomical structures precisely arranged to transform acoustic vibrations to electrical nerve impulses. We must also have the ability to interpret impulses in the auditory nerve, to comprehend the electrical signals channeling to our brains, for any communication to occur.

The brain takes signals, and turns them into words and sentences and, then eventually, into ideas. In a few tenths of a second, a sound from your ear can become an idea in your mind. Your ears and brain need to work together to make this happen properly.

The complexity of interpreting auditory signals within the brain has challenged our understanding.

For neuroscientists, human hearing is a process full of unanswered questions. How does the brain translate sounds — vibrations that travel through the air — into the patterns of neural activity that we recognize as speech, or laughter, or the footsteps of an approaching friend?

Independent Complex Systems 

Perhaps we let this incredible phenomenon of communication go unappreciated by virtue of its familiarity to us. Three independent complex systems are required: speech, hearing, and cognitive interpretation. Having (or, to use the evolutionary view, evolving) one feature provides no guarantee the other two will arise. No partial benefit to communication comes from, say, speech and comprehension without hearing. Or hearing and comprehension without speech. All three features of communication are needed. Each of the features entail specific, complex biochemical and neurological functionality. Together, the three essential components of communication comprise a system of irreducibly complex systems.

In the animal kingdom, we can recognize many examples of communication. Even though squirrels may not be discussing politics or theories of cosmology, they use a variety of vocalizations for their own benefit.

Vocal communication is an important method squirrels (Sciuridae) use to transfer information from one individual to others….vocal communication is important to the development, reproduction, and survival of squirrels…

Most research emphasizes the evolutionary origin of animal communication, citing its obvious benefit for enhancing survival. While the survival benefit of communication ability should be obvious, the irreducible complexity of any communication system defies explanation from evolution.

The independent complex features required for effective human communication are mirrored in animal communication (expression, reception, comprehension), and they even appear in the plant world. For example, research indicates that trees engage in communication.

[Trees] are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.

The National Park Service reports:

It has been known for at least a couple of decades that trees and plants can communicate by releasing volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Again, an irreducibly complex system is involved in arboreal communication: the message must be expressed and received. But this is not enough — the message must produce the intended result, otherwise the whole system is a waste.

Considering again the example of physiological communication within the body, the importance of this process for life has not been lost on the scientific community, expressed with the presupposition of evolution.

In the process of evolutionary history, advancement of the life as a group wouldn’t be possible without cells, tissues and systems communicating with each other with specific communication mechanisms.

Neither has the interconnected necessity of features of successful communication gone unnoticed.

Theory predicts that for a signal to evolve, both the sender(s) and receiver(s) should benefit from their interaction. Thus, there should be tight coevolution between signal production and subsequent perception and response.

Suspending Disbelief

How is it possible to assume that the myriad forms of sophisticated communication between and within living things just happened to evolve? How can one conclude that each essential feature happened to come online in parallel, through undirected processes whose only raison d’être is enhanced procreation? Doesn’t such a hypothesis require an unbearable suspension of disbelief?

The implication of the irreducible nature of communication is clear, but by holding the wrong assumptions it’s possible to hear the signal and miss the message.