goldctrsteve said:
I'd be interested to hear a summary of evolutionists' answer to irreducible complexity. Can you summarise it in a couple of paragraphs?
Apart from 'it's a steaming pile of horse sh1t' you mean :wink:
The irreduceable complexity arguments are, by their nature, particular. The ID guys looks for a new and difficult example of evolving from A to Z then possit it as a 'proof' of ID.
There are literally millions of things they could pick because, of course, not every organism or componant part of an organism has been analysed in this level of detail.
As is normal in science, the scientists then look at the particular A-Z problem and provide explanations about how it could have evolved.
The ID guys back away and look for another problem to pose. In the meantime the damage is done as the Discovery Instute's PR machine has been able to publish another "evolution in crisis" piece of nonsense to promote it's cause.
For example, the bacteria flagellum.
"This flagellum is a tiny propeller attached to the back of some bacteria. Spinning at more than twenty thousand r.p.m.s, it motors the bacterium through its aquatic world. The flagellum comprises roughly thirty different proteins, all precisely arranged, and if any one of them is removed the flagellum stops spinning.
In Darwins Black Box, Behe maintained that irreducible complexity presents Darwinism with unbridgeable chasms. How, after all, could a gradual process of incremental improvement build something like a flagellum, which needs all its parts in order to work? Scientists, he argued, must face up to the fact that many biochemical systems cannot be built by natural selection working on mutations. In the end, Behe concluded that irreducibly complex cells arise the same way as irreducibly complex mousetrapssomeone designs them.
Behe speculated that the designer might have assembled the first cell, essentially solving the problem of irreducible complexity, after which evolution might well have proceeded by more or less conventional means."
So Behe puts the argument and the scientists ponder it. They put forward several different ways that Darwinian evolution can build irreducibly complex systems.
"Elaborate structures may evolve for one reason and then get co-opted for some entirely different, irreducibly complex function. Who says those thirty flagellar proteins werent present in bacteria long before bacteria sported flagella? They may have been performing other jobs in the cell and only later got drafted into flagellum-building. Indeed, theres now strong evidence that several flagellar proteins once played roles in a type of molecular pump found in the membranes of bacterial cells."
Another but this time direct route:
"Suppose a part gets added to a system merely because the part improves the systems performance; the part is not, at this stage, essential for function. But, because subsequent evolution builds on this addition, a part that was at first just advantageous might become essential. As this process is repeated through evolutionary time, more and more parts that were once merely beneficial become necessary"
The analogy:
"We add new parts like global-positioning systems to cars not because theyre necessary but because theyre nice. But no one would be surprised if, in fifty years, computers that rely on G.P.S. actually drove our cars. At that point, G.P.S. would no longer be an attractive option; it would be an essential piece of automotive technology. Its important to see that this process is thoroughly Darwinian: each change might well be small and each represents an improvement."
Behe did the same with blood clotting proteins suggesting that beacuse the process needed 20 proteins to work they could not have evolved through natural selection pressures. With this one he shpot himself in the foot because we actually know a huge amount about blood clotting processes and can give a fairly clear genetic explanation of how the different proteins would have evolved.
Anyway you probably see the dilemma; it is easy to dig out examples of complex things and challenge the evolutionists to prove how they evolved. When an answer is given move on to the next.........
