Seymour Flops
Diamond Member
The basic idea of complexity as an argument in favor of design, and against the random mutations required by Darwinism is that random processes do not create complex systems that work together.
Suppose you wrote a thousand basic English words on individual cards. Then you write the conjugations of all the verbs, all the pronoun forms, and say the top two hundred first names, on separate cards. So you would get maybe three thousand cards (a guess).
Randomly pull any two cards and line them up in the order you pulled them and a non-zero percent of the time, you will get a complete sentence that makes sense. "John works." "She smiles." "Cats fight." etc. Mainly you will get unusable sentence fragments "Purple tire," "Happy stripe," "brick bumper," etc.
Make it three cards and the percent of three card sequences that create a sentence will sharply drop. Four, five, six, and so on, the percent approaches zero very rapidly. You'll wear out your arm drawing cards waiting for a sentence to appear.
Darwin's theory consists of confidence that such random process improbabilities have occurred over and over, literally billions of times. It could have happened, sure. It's nearly impossible for one person to win the lotto twice, but some guy in Maryland did it recently.
But "could happen," is a far cry from "did happen," and an even further cry from "Of course it happened, and only a religious fanatic would even dare doubt that it happened FOR SURE!"
It is far more likely that the evolutionary process was guided by design.
Michael Behe wrote about "irreducible complexity," at the molecular level in living organisms. I feel that I can understand his argument, but I'm not sure if I could explain it, particularly to the members of this forum. So I'll quote him and you can judge for yourself.
I defined an irreducibly complex system as: a single system which is necessarily composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. (Behe 2001)
As an example of an irreducibly complex system from everyday life, I pointed to a mechanical mousetrap such as one finds in a hardware store. Typically such traps have a number of parts: a spring, wooden platform, hammer, and other pieces. If one removes a piece from the trap, it can’t catch mice.
Irreducibly complex systems seem very difficult to fit into a Darwinian framework, for a reason insisted upon by Darwin himself. In the Origin Darwin wrote that “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.
The question then becomes, are there any irreducibly complex systems in the cell? Are there any irreducibly complex molecular machines? Yes, there are many. In Darwin’s Black Box I discussed several biochemical systems as examples of irreducible complexity: the eukaryotic cilium; the intracellular transport system; and more. Here I will just briefly describe the bacterial flagellum (DeRosier 1998; Shapiro 1995), since its structure makes the difficulty for Darwinian evolution easy to see. (Figure 19.1) The flagellum can be thought of as an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim. It was the first truly rotary structure discovered in nature. It consists of a long filamentous tail that acts as a propeller; when it is spun it pushes against the liquid medium and can propel the bacterium forward. The propeller is attached to the drive shaft indirectly through something called the hook region, which acts as a universal joint. The drive shaft is attached to the motor, which uses a flow of acid or sodium ions from the outside of the cell to the inside to power rotation. Just as an outboard motor has to be kept stationary on a motorboat while the propeller turns, there are proteins which act as a stator structure to keep the flagellum in place. Other proteins act as bushings to permit the drive shaft to pass through the bacterial membrane. Studies have shown that 30-40 proteins are required to produce a functioning flagellum in the cell. About half of the proteins are components of the finished structure, while the others are necessary for the construction of the flagellum.
Suppose you wrote a thousand basic English words on individual cards. Then you write the conjugations of all the verbs, all the pronoun forms, and say the top two hundred first names, on separate cards. So you would get maybe three thousand cards (a guess).
Randomly pull any two cards and line them up in the order you pulled them and a non-zero percent of the time, you will get a complete sentence that makes sense. "John works." "She smiles." "Cats fight." etc. Mainly you will get unusable sentence fragments "Purple tire," "Happy stripe," "brick bumper," etc.
Make it three cards and the percent of three card sequences that create a sentence will sharply drop. Four, five, six, and so on, the percent approaches zero very rapidly. You'll wear out your arm drawing cards waiting for a sentence to appear.
Darwin's theory consists of confidence that such random process improbabilities have occurred over and over, literally billions of times. It could have happened, sure. It's nearly impossible for one person to win the lotto twice, but some guy in Maryland did it recently.
But "could happen," is a far cry from "did happen," and an even further cry from "Of course it happened, and only a religious fanatic would even dare doubt that it happened FOR SURE!"
It is far more likely that the evolutionary process was guided by design.
Michael Behe wrote about "irreducible complexity," at the molecular level in living organisms. I feel that I can understand his argument, but I'm not sure if I could explain it, particularly to the members of this forum. So I'll quote him and you can judge for yourself.
I defined an irreducibly complex system as: a single system which is necessarily composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. (Behe 2001)
As an example of an irreducibly complex system from everyday life, I pointed to a mechanical mousetrap such as one finds in a hardware store. Typically such traps have a number of parts: a spring, wooden platform, hammer, and other pieces. If one removes a piece from the trap, it can’t catch mice.
Irreducibly complex systems seem very difficult to fit into a Darwinian framework, for a reason insisted upon by Darwin himself. In the Origin Darwin wrote that “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.
The question then becomes, are there any irreducibly complex systems in the cell? Are there any irreducibly complex molecular machines? Yes, there are many. In Darwin’s Black Box I discussed several biochemical systems as examples of irreducible complexity: the eukaryotic cilium; the intracellular transport system; and more. Here I will just briefly describe the bacterial flagellum (DeRosier 1998; Shapiro 1995), since its structure makes the difficulty for Darwinian evolution easy to see. (Figure 19.1) The flagellum can be thought of as an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim. It was the first truly rotary structure discovered in nature. It consists of a long filamentous tail that acts as a propeller; when it is spun it pushes against the liquid medium and can propel the bacterium forward. The propeller is attached to the drive shaft indirectly through something called the hook region, which acts as a universal joint. The drive shaft is attached to the motor, which uses a flow of acid or sodium ions from the outside of the cell to the inside to power rotation. Just as an outboard motor has to be kept stationary on a motorboat while the propeller turns, there are proteins which act as a stator structure to keep the flagellum in place. Other proteins act as bushings to permit the drive shaft to pass through the bacterial membrane. Studies have shown that 30-40 proteins are required to produce a functioning flagellum in the cell. About half of the proteins are components of the finished structure, while the others are necessary for the construction of the flagellum.
