Even from a biological perspective, evolution is unable to
bridge the gap between reality and any naturalistic explanation of it. In his
new book, Undeniable: How Biology
confirms our Intuition that Life is Designed, Douglas Ax argues that “functional
coherence,” like “irreducible complexity,” argues against gradualistic
evolution. How? Ax argues that many coordinated biological components have to
be in place before the organism can have an “adaptive advantage,” before a
trait can confer any survival value or even survive. Ax provides the example of
photosynthesis within a single celled organism:
·
The photosynthetic apparatus in relatively simple
single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria has hundreds of molecular parts
that are precisely positioned to enable the apparatus to gather photons from
the sun and convert their energy into the chemical energy in sugar. The photosystem’s
overall function depends on an extensive hierarchy of subfunctions, all “contributing
in a coordinated way to the whole.” (Jonathan Wells, Salvo Magazine, #39,
Winter 2016, 45)
Ax concludes that this “makes accidental invention fantastically
improbable and therefore physically impossible,” and that these designs “can
only come from deliberate, intelligent action.”
Biologist Jonathan Wells observes:
·
Natural selection has never been observed to
produce anything more than minor changes within existing species, but higher
forms of life contain many more inventions than we find in cyanobacteria. (45)
Ax concludes that because such inventions involve high
levels of complex additions, explaining them is like the problem of explaining
the origin of life:
·
“Because each new life form amounts to a new
high-level invention, the origin of the thousandth new life form is no more
explicable in Darwinian terms than the origin of life.”
Consequently, the problems seem to be overwhelming the beleaguered
theory of evolution.
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