  Courcelle's famous theorem from 1990 states that any property of graphs
definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO) can be decided in linear time on
any class of graphs of bounded treewidth, or in other words, MSO is
fixed-parameter tractable in linear time on any such class of graphs. From a
logical perspective, Courcelle's theorem establishes a sufficient condition, or
an upper bound, for tractability of MSO-model checking.
  Whereas such upper bounds on the complexity of logics have received
significant attention in the literature, almost nothing is known about
corresponding lower bounds. In this paper we establish a strong lower bound for
the complexity of monadic second-order logic. In particular, we show that if C
is any class of graphs which is closed under taking subgraphs and whose
treewidth is not bounded by a polylogarithmic function (in fact, $\log^c n$ for
some small c suffices) then MSO-model checking is intractable on C (under a
suitable assumption from complexity theory).
