ARE ORGANS IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX, THEREBY DEFYING DARWINIAN GRADUALISM?

Irreducible complexity is a theory that argues in favor of an intelligent Designer by showing that random mutation and natural selection are unable to account for new organs or structures. Evolution must take place step-by-step and each step must confer a survival advantage. However, to confer this advantage, many new genes must be simultaneously in place to produce any beneficial structure. Richard Kleiss provides the example of blood clotting as an irreducibly complex process:

• Bleeding must be stopped. While the scab is forming…the blood below is making a completely different kind of clot out of blood platelets and protein…Your body increases the flow of blood enriched with white blood cells. These cells not only search out and kill germs, but clean the wound of damaged cellular tissues. Skins cells start to increase the rate at which they make new cells in order to bridge the cut with new skin. Underneath…cells called fibroblasts fill the wound to strengthen the tender new tissue, and then contract to pull the wound closed. Finally, blood vessels and nerves complete their repairs as the fibroblasts position themselves along the lines of stress to prevent further damage.” (A Closer Look at the Evidence)

Without any one of these processes, any cut could cause death. In fact, any structure is irreducibly complex. Atheist Richard Dawkins admits that:

• The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. (The God Delusion, 125)

Darwin himself said as much:

• “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”

Is there any evidence that new organs arise through “slight modifications?” Casey Luskin cites the late biologist, Lynn Margulis, member of the National Academy of Sciences: "new mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.” She further explained in a 2011 interview:

• [N]eo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change-led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

Is there any evidence? Apparently none! John C. Lennox quotes several evolutionists to this effect:

• John Maynard Smith, E. Szathmary: “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.” (God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God, 107)

• Siegfried Scherer: “In the whole experimentally accessible domain of microevolution (including research in artificial breeding and in species formation), all variations have certainly remained within the confines of basic types.” ()

• Cell biologist E.J. Ambrose of the University of London argued that it is unlikely that fewer than five genes could ever be involved in the formation of even the simplest new structure, previously unknown in the organism. He then points out that only one in 1,000 mutations is non-deleterious, so that the chance of five non-deleterious mutations [the minimum necessary for any new function] occurring is 1 in a million billion replications.

This means that every organism will probably die before it adds a new organ! But evolutionists assure us that, eventually, they will come up with a solution.