Few evolutionists would agree, but by my reckoning, there are now two strikes on Darwinism. Whoa! Here comes a Nolan Ryan fastball!
The problem of half organs
In a popular evolutionary explanation, here's how reptiles evolved into birds: They wanted to eat flying insects that were out of reach. So the rep tiles began leaping, and flapping their arms to get higher. Over millions of years, their limbs transformed into wings by increments.l In another model, the reptiles were tree-dwellers who leaped. Those who glided well survived and eventually developed wings, but those who glided poorly went ker plunk and were wiped out. In these scenarios, the reptiles' scales sprouted feathers over time, and finally, they became birds.
One problem is that, anatomically, reptilian scales and bird feathers are completely dissimilar. Scales are a tough, thin plate. Feathers are soft and delicate; like hair, they arise from small holes in the skin called follicles; they are held together by a network of little hooks invisible to the naked eye-one eagle feather has over 250,000 of them.
In Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, Barbara J. Stahl noted: "It is not difficult to imagine how feathers, once evolved, assumed additional functions, but how they rose initially, presumably from reptilian scales, defies analysis."2
The theory suffers from an illogical premise that pervades Darwinism. According to natural selection, a physical trait is acquired because it enhances survival. Obviously, flight is beneficial, and one can certainly see how flying animals might survive better than those who couldn't, and thus natural selection would preserve them.
The problem is, wings would have no survival value until they reached the point of flight. Birds' wings and feathers are perfectly designed instruments. Those with crippled or clipped wings cannot fly, and are bad candidates for survival. Likewise, the intermediate creature whose limb was half leg, half wing, would fare poorly-it couldn't fly, nor walk well. Natural selection would eliminate it without a second thought.
The same would hold true for the limbs that Darwinism's fish supposedly developed, or for any body part. Until the organ is operative, it offers no advantage, and natural selection has no reason to favor it. As Stephen Jay Gould asked: "Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?"3 Evolutionists, including Gould, generally try to explain organs' develop ment by hypothesizing that, en route to becoming functional, they must have served some other useful purpose, now unknown to us, and thus survived under natural selection. But this is merely a rationalization based on no evidence.
A classic example of an organ that could not have evolved is the human eye, whose superlative design was not really appreciated until the invention of cameras and other optical instruments dependent on the same principles.
For sight to occur, light must pass through the pupil, which automatically adjusts, by widening or contracting, to permit a proper amount of light to enter the eye. It then passes through the lens, which focuses the image on the retina, the light-sensitive area in back of the eye. The retina contains more than 120 million photosensitive cells called rods and cones, which translate light into nerve impulses that reach the brain via the optic nerve.
Vision requires that all of these be working. How then did natural selection make them? Did the lens precede the retina? Did the optic nerve come first? By themselves, none of these constitute vision; they possess no inherent survival value that would cause natural selection to prefer them. To accept evolution, we must believe that chance mutations simultaneously developed each, until one day, by sheer coincidence, all were complete and harmoniously arranged, and vision occurred. The situation troubled Darwin himself, who noted:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.4
Most evolutionary texts avoid discussing eye evolution. One that tried Gavin de Beer's Atlas of Evolution-followed Darwin's own attempted explanation by showing a sequence of eyes of different organisms, starting with the most primitive. But as one observer pointed out, "This mere listing of eyes from various animals, which he neglects (or is unable) to show to be related can carry no conviction for the case for evolution. It would be equally stupid to place a candle, a torch and a searchlight side by side and proceed to advance to a genealogical relationship."5
What about color vision? Michael Pitman wrote:
It is found in several bony fishes, reptiles, birds, bees and primates. Among mammals only primates see in color. Dogs, cats, horses and bulls do not. Fish supposedly evolved the necessary retinal cones to give them color vision, but then lost them. "Re-evolved" by certain unrelated birds and reptiles, they were lost by mammals, but by luck "re-surfaced" in primates. An odd story indeed.6
Science has proven the eye far more complicated than was known in Darwin's time. Any organ, of course, may be reduced to its molecular struc ture. In Darwin 's Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe describes vision's microscopic physiology. The following material is full of technical words, but this underscores the complexity:
When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called II-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a single human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin . . . .
GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II now binds to a protein called phos phodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to "cut" a molecule called cGMP . . . . When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phos phodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane that, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.7
So mutations had to engineer, simultaneously, not only the gross anatomical structures of the eye, but its elaborate molecular interactions.
Irreducible complexity
As the complexity of anything increases, the probability of chance creating it decreases. The main point of Behe's book is that biochemistry has proven a number of bodily systems to be irreducibly complex. He says that "design [intelligent creation] is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components."8 Gradual change, as Darwin proposed, cannot produce such systems because "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional."9
on an enzyme to activate it. So which evolved first-the protein or enzyme? Not the protein; it cannot function without the enzyme to switch it on. But why would the enzyme have come first?-without the protein, it serves no purpose. The system is irreducibly complex.
If a person lacks just one clotting factor, as in hemophilia (a mutational disorder), he risks severe bleeding. Furthermore, after a clot forms, the proteins which produced it must be inactivated by other substances-otherwise the rest of the person's blood would start to coagulate. Step-by-step evolution of clotting is inconceivable: in the trial and error stage, organisms would have either bled to death or clotted to death.
Another example Behe gives: the immune system. In infections, it must distinguish the invading bacterial cells from the body's own cells-other wise the latter will be attacked (which is the case in "autoimmune" diseases). An antibody identifies the bacterium by attaching to it. In a complex bio chemical process, a variety of white blood cells-"killer cells" such as lym phocytes and macrophages-are notified of the bacterium's presence. These travel to the site, and, using the identifying antibody, attack the enemy.
Like blood clotting, this system is irreducibly complex. What evolved first? The killer cells? Without the identifying antibody, they wouldn't know where to attack. But why would the identifier develop first, without any thing to notify? If the network evolved gradually, disease would kill the individual before it was perfected.
Behe notes the paucity of articles and books on how such biochemical entities evolved. He says that "if you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines-the basis of life-developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it. . . .10 In his research, he found only two very short, highly speculative papers attempting to explain the immune system's evolution on a molecular level." Biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago agrees:
There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory explanation for such a vast subject-evolution-with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity. 12
The human body, as a total system, is also irreducibly complex. It is difficult to change one part without influencing others. Take the liver: it manufactures bile; detoxifies poisons and wastes; regulates storage and use of glucose, proteins, fats and vitamins; synthesizes blood clotting and immune system factors; and processes breakdown products of old blood cells. Or take the kidneys: they remove wastes through urine production; regulate the body's water content and electrolytes (sodium, calcium, etc.); and support the adrenal glands, which secrete hormones such as adrenaline.
Evolution says every organ developed through chance mutations. But structures like the liver or kidneys cannot change without drastically affecting the rest of the body, with which they maintain a delicate balance. We must assume that by lucky happenstance, each time these organs mutated, other body parts also mutated in harmonious cooperation. The noted writer Arthur Koestler commented:
You cannot have a mutation A occurring alone, preserve it by natural selection, and then wait a few thousand or million years until mutation B joins it, and so on, to C and D. Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all interdependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to common sense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation 13
And what of the human brain? W. H. Yokel wrote in a promotional letter for Scientific American in 1979:
The deep new knowledge about the brain, gathered at an accelerated rate in recent years, shows this organ to be marvelously designed and capacitated beyond the wonders with which it was invested by ignorant imagination.
Microelectronics can pack about a million circuits in a cubic foot, whereas the brain has been estimated to pack a million million circuits per cubic foot. Computer switches interact with not more than two other switches at a time, whereas a brain cell may be wired to 1,000 other cells on both its input and output sides . .. . 14
Yokel called the brain "designed." It has about ten billion neurons (nerve cells) with a thousand trillion connections. 15 Each neuron contains around one trillion atoms. The brain can do the work of hundreds of supercomputers. Building a computer requires great intelligence. Who believes even a simple one could arise by chance? Indeed, the brain is more than a computer-"It is a video camera and library, a computer and communications center, all in one." 16 Yokel added:
Perhaps the most elusive questions surround the brain functions that make us human-the capacities of memory and learning. Transcending what might be called the hardware of the brain, there comes a software capacity that eludes hypothesis. The number that expresses this capacity in digital information bits exceeds the largest number to which any physical meaning can be attached. 17
How about our thoughts? Did chance evolve them, too? Darwin critic Phillip Johnson asks:
Are our thoughts "nothing but" the products of chemical reactions in the brain, and did our thinking abilities originate for no reason other than their utility in allowing our DNA to reproduce itself? Even scientific materialists have a hard time believing that. For one thing, materialism applied to the mind undermines the validity of all reasoning, including one's own. If our theories are the products of chemical reactions, how can we know whether our theories are true? Perhaps [evolutionist] Richard Dawkins believes in Darwinism only because he has a certain chemical in his brain, and his belief could be changed by somehow inserting a differ ent chemical.18
The animal kingdom also illustrates features too complex for evolution to explain. Time magazine, in an article critical of creationism, described the remarkable bombardier beetle:
Its defense system is extraordinarily intricate, a cross between tear gas and a tommy gun. When the beetle senses danger, it internally mixes enzymes contained in one body chamber with concentrated solutions of some rather harmless compounds, hydrogen peroxide and hydro quinones, confined to a second chamber. This generates a noxious spray of caustic benzoquinones, which explode from its body at a boiling 212 F. What is more, the fluid is pumped through twin rear nozzles, which can be rotated, like a B- l 7's gun turret, to hit a hungry ant or frog with bull's-eye accuracy. 37
Since the chemicals and enzymes are explosive when mixed in a small space, how could chance have evolved this defense system without blowing the beetle to smithereens?
Or how could natural selection produce the monarch butterfly, which transforms from a caterpillar to a butterfly with two compound eyes, each with 6,000 lenses, and a brain that can decipher 72,000 nerve impulses from the eyes?20 Extinct creatures make the problem even more perplexing. Cambrian rocks, dated at over 500 million years, contain fossils of many of the oldest invertebrates known. Among them: the trilobite. It was an arthropod (the broad category of joint-legged animal that includes lobsters and spiders).
According to evolution, Cambrian rocks should contain only "primitive" organisms. The trilobite was anything but. It had a segmented body, legs, gills, antennae, and a complex nervous system. Moreover,
Blood clotting swings into action when we get a cut. Its multi-step process utilizes proteins, many with no other function besides clotting. Each protein depends according to Science News, trilobites had "the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature."21
Riccardo Levi-Setti of the University of Chicago writes in his book Trilobites:
In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. And a final discovery that the refracting interface between the two lens elements in a trilobite's eye was designed in accordance with optical constructions worked out by Descartes and Huygens in the mid-seventeenth century-borders on sheer science fiction . . . . The design of the trilobite's eye lens could well qualify for a patent disclosure.22
Like other animals, trilobites lack fossil ancestors showing how they evolved.
TORNADO IN A JUNKYARD THE RELENTLESS MYTH OF DARWINISM
James Perloff
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