Charles Darwin had asserted that the only way evolution could possibly work was one step at a time – each step conferring a survival advantage. However, what happens when this survival advantage can only be realized when a particular improvement requires 50 or 100 “steps” all occurring simultaneously? Well, Darwin admitted that this was far more than his theory of “natural selection” could bear.
Meanwhile, intelligent design (ID) theorists have pointed to thousands of examples where one or two or ten incremental steps (mutations) occurring at once couldn’t possibly confer any sort of survival advantage upon its host. They call these structures “irreducibly complex,” since they seem to defy any step by step explanation of their origins. Creationist, Bruce Malone, Search for the Truth Ministries, has described many of them. Here’s a recent one:
• A species of millipede called apheloria has an almost unbelievable defense mechanism. Many millipedes roll up or give off a foul smell when attacked, but not this one. Each segment of this millipede’s body contains special glands that make a chemical for its protection. When the enemy attacks, the millipede mixes this chemical with a catalyst. The resulting reaction produces hydrogen cyanide gas – the same gas used in Hitler’s gas chambers to kill people! Both millipede and the enemy are engulfed in a cloud of this deadly cyanide gas. The enemy dies – while the millipede simply walks away! How did the millipede develop this gas? How did it develop immunity to cyanide gas at the same time? How many millipedes were eaten before they developed this type of defense? How many millipedes died by gassing themselves? Evolution would say all this happened by mutational accidents.
However, the millipede would not only have to have the means to produce the gas, it would also have to have the means of storing it, ejecting it, and having its own defense against the gas – all at the same time. Although evolutionists have faith that they will eventually be able to explain how these incredibly complex systems can arise through natural selection, they lack any reasonable explanation for any of them. Even evolutionists concede that their faith is not without serious problems:
• There is no theoretical reason that would permit us to expect that evolutionary lines would increase in complexity with time; there is also no empirical evidence that this happens. (John Maynard Smith, E. Szathmary—quoted from John Lennox’s book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God, 107.
Sadly, the man on the street has been so pumped with evolutionary orthodoxy that he doesn’t even consider that there might be another way of looking at things.
Daniel once again you're showing your ignorance and pedalling nonsense.
ReplyDeleteAll the examples of IR produced thus far by ID'ists completely ignore other function and scaffolding. When taken into account the examples of claimed IR tend to be amenable to naturalistic explanations.
What ID'ists actually need to do is the research to demonstrate that these supposedly unevolveable features are actually unevolveable. At present the furthest they seem to get is "You have no current explanation for this, therefore is cannot have evolved".
Please please please read up on actual science rather than the Christian apologetics masquerading as knowledge you tend to rely upon.
Also, Bruce Malone is a chemical engineer, so from the beginning he seems to have no qualifications or adequate knowledge to comment on evolution in the manner he is.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you'd like to present your own hypothesis for how this particular feature of this millipede came about. Make sure you include sufficient detail and empirical content for your hypothesis to be tested, and try to reduce the number of a priori assumptions required to accept this hypothesis. Perhaps you could get Bruce Malone to help you draft this hypothesis.
Once you provide such an hypothesis, and it stands up to independent testing, then perhaps we can say that whatever your "God did it" hypothesis ends up being is the correct explanation for this feature.
Until you actually produce such an hypothesis, then we're left saying "I don't know". But given the success of evolutionary explanations in the past, we ought to tentatively accept that an evolutionary explanation is likely.
Funny - Malone appears to be a YEC.
ReplyDeleteThe YEC position includes so many ad-hoc hypothesis to attempt to stand, and it still falls over.
Anyone who holds to a young earth is certainly putting reality, logic and reason on a lower footing than their personal subjective feelings.
Havok,
ReplyDeleteThere are many people who are skeptical about chance mechanisms generating life or even informational complexity. Even your Richard Dawkins disparages chance mechanisms:
o It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it wouldn’t work. You don’t need to be a mathematician or a physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. (Dawkins, 103)
o “The mathematical probability that the precisely designed molecules needed for the simplest bacteria could form by chance arrangements of amino acids is far less than 1 in 10 followed by 450 zeroes.” Kleiss
o “The coded instructions contained in the DNA of a human cell would fill 4,000 encyclopedia-sized books.” Kleiss
o “To make DNA, you have to have DNA in the first place…This leads to the conclusion that cells could never have evolved, they simply had to have been created with the DNA code already in them!” Kleiss
o “If a cell were magnified a thousand million times…in every direction we looked, we would see all sorts of robot-like machines…the task of designing even one such molecular machine would be completely beyond our capacity.” Michael Denton
Mann: There are many people who are skeptical about chance mechanisms generating life or even informational complexity.
ReplyDeleteThat would be because the probability of chance mechanisms alone doing these things is very small. What you (and other creationists and ID'ists) completely ignore is that evolution (and even abiogenesis) is NOT a chance mechanism. The well known engine of evolutionary change is mutation (chance-ish) plus natural selection.
This is exactly what Dawkins seems to be addressing.
This is what Kleiss seems to be ignoring in the first quotation.
And Denton completely ignores the ad-hoc and haphazard nature of these "molecular machines".
Now, perhaps you could educate yourself regarding the scientific theory of biological evolution - the evidence supporting it, the mechanisms for it, and so on and so on.
It actually seems that, when you quote these ID'ists and creationists, you think the arguments have not been addressed by legitimate scientists.
ReplyDeleteThere are gaps in our knowledge, but they're rarely the supposed gaps claimed by ID'ists and Creationists, and I don't think these gaps are ever actually filled by ID and/or creationist explanations.
Daniel. I have to thank you for introducing me to Malone. Some of the videos he has on his website are absolutely terrible (as is the extract of the book you took your quotation from) :-)
ReplyDeleteThe crux of your argument against scientific explanations of life's origins seems to be "it's all so rare and complicated that 'God did it' is the only answer I can comprehend."
ReplyDeleteWell that don't cut it, mister. I don't fully understand how my furnace works, but I don't go proclaiming that Quetzalcoatl, God of the Morning Star made it.
So what if something had only a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 chance of working. The planet has existed for BILLIONS of years. Don't you understand how much time that is? Well, it's long enough for 10,000,000,000,000 instances of just about anything for one.
I do not (cannot) understand why the appropriate level of gob-smacked wonder doesn't strike you with scientific explanations of things. Why do you have to go right to magic and the supernatural?
It seems lazy, honestly.
frightfan,
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm just not sufficiently impressed by what evolutionists have to offer on the subject.
I'm confused at that though. The origin story of our existence, as explained by science (evolution, The Big Bang and so on) is, to me, awe-inspiring to say the least. It certainly is difficult for me to fully take in, but that only serves to fill me with appreciation for the work that goes into scientific discovery.
ReplyDeleteI just see this theory engulfed in insurmountable problems.
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