Creation Science Winter 2008

The idea of irreducible complexity as described by Michael Behe in his book Darwin's Black Box is that there are complex systems "composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning". This lack of a functioning precursor to a complex system means the individual parts must have arisen without the benefit foreseen in the final component. But natural selection requires each tiny step of change to be beneficial along the way.

We understand the benefit of the integrated complex systems which perform some amazing functions like vision or hearing or respiration. But how can the parts which make up this system be of any benefit by themselves? What good is a light sensitive spot (an early retina) without the nerve to carry the signal or without the brain function to interpret the signal as vision? Just as the individual parts of an airplane are all non-flying parts until they come together in an organized and specified complexity, the parts of a integrated system also perform no worthwhile function without the other parts.

The famous example Behe gives to illustrate this concept is the mousetrap. As simple as it is, the mousetrap is highly effective but irreducibly complex. The mousetrap is made up of five major parts as illustrated in the diagram.

How effective would this mousetrap be if it were missing any one of the parts? Would it be able to catch any mice without the holding bar for example? Of course the answer is that any missing part would render the mousetrap useless and essentially broken. Any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition useless. All parts must come together at same time, and along the way, each separate part has to be beneficial to survival. If a part is not yet integral to the complete system, it must play some other beneficial function in the meantime (millions of years).

People have often talked about building a better mousetrap. Well, the "mousetraps" we have in our bodies such as the eye are models of perfection so the question is not how to make it better but how to make it at all.

According to Neo-Darwinian Evolution I am. Let me explain.

Natural selection does not create anything new. It is just the idea that when something new comes along it may or may not be beneficial but if it is, it will be favored within the population and will have a better chance to succeed in the struggle for life. So how does something new come about? Darwin just called these changes "modifications" and really did not understand much more that the fact he observed differences among offspring and assumed these sorts of changes were a fact of life. But modern science now understands how the modifications or changes occur and that is through mutations.

A mutation can either be harmful, lethal, neutral or beneficial. A mutation might be something as simple and benign as a patch of discolored skin or it could result in a dramatic increase in the length of some bones. These mutations might even be beneficial and could be inherited by offspring which would then benefit as well. But how often do you think of a mutation as beneficial? First of all mutations are rare, thank God. But when they do occur, we normally recoil a them because they mostly have deleterious consequences. But the idea of a beneficial mutation is unheard of. Supposedly beneficial mutations are preserved and concentrated in the population while all the others are weeded out.

A mutation is a mistake in the cell division process. Cell division requires that the DNA strand be duplicated. An error in this copying process is a mutation. I am a software developer and suppose I write a computer program that I want to market and so I finish my work and I am ready to make the CD's to package and sell my product. I take my original program, which is nothing more than a organized sequence of bits and bytes, to a CD duplicator and lets suppose that a mistake occurs while copying the bits over to another CD. Is there any chance my program will improve? What do you suppose will happen when the instructions at the location of the mistake are executed? The program will not be any better, rather it will crash or at best give an incorrect response.

Mutations are the engine of evolution. Theodosius Dobzhansky, in the American Scientist Journal said:

“The process of mutation is the only known source of the raw materials of genetic variability, and hence of evolution ... The mutants which arise are, with rare exceptions, deleterious to their carriers, at least in the environments which the species normally encounters.”

And Ernst Mayr said "Ultimately, all variation is, of course, due to mutation.” Think about the consequences of this. The DNA molecule specifies a living organism's entire structure, it's size, shape, color, and function. The words and language of the DNA molecule are found in the arrangement of nucleotide base pairs which make up the "rungs" of the DNA ladder. For the singled celled amoeba, there are about two million of these instructions. For the human, there are about six billion. That's a 3,000 times increase in information content.

To tell you how to build a cool paper airplane, I can write the instructions for how to fold it on an index card easily. But can you imagine the number of books, blueprints and manuals it would take to specify the construction of the space shuttle? The reason it requires more instructions is intuitive; a space shuttle is far more complex than a paper airplane. This is true of the difference between a human and an amoeba. But we are supposed to believe that we all came from a single celled life form arising from the primordial goo. The point is, that is an astonishing increase in perfectly organized information content due entirely to beneficial mutations. And the motivation for believing such an absurd thing in the presence of all the evidence to the contrary is to avoid any mention of God.

Am I a mutant? Certainly not!

Genesis 1:27 (NKJV)

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

This diagram shows a very simple version of the evolutionary tree of life. Life begins a the bottom and evolves by branching off into the various major types ending with humans. Notice how we did not evolve from apes (primates) but where those two branches tie together is supposed to be our common ancestor. The reason there's no label there is that they haven't found it yet! But boy are they looking for it. There are candidates proposed all the time but they never seem to work out enough to fill in the the missing label. In fact, notice the absence of labels at all of the branching points. None, nada, zip. Could it be because that's not the way it happened?

There is another tree of life spoken of in the Bible.

Genesis 2:8-9 (NKJV)

The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Revelation 22:14 (NKJV)

Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city.

Below is the second part ten-minute video on The Design Inference.

Evolutionists always point out the ability for a species to change over generations as evidence of evolution. As we have discovered in the previous articles, to the extent that such change is limited by the genetic variability built in to the genome, this is unmistakable and is demonstrated every day by the actions of breeders. But you see, they get you nodding your head about how such changes are so easily explained by natural selection and have no need for some outside influence. Then they make the simple suggestion that such small changes continuing to occur over millions of years could produce the incredible variety of life we see today. Yet no examples of this newly proposed phenomenon are given, just the simple examples already given. This is called a bait and switch. The bait is micro evolution and the switch is macro evolution; small change becomes all change.

The whole point too is to appeal to the ability of natural selection. This carries the idea that there is no need for anything supernatural to make it work. I could argue the same way about the heating and cooling system in my house. Once everything is set up, I can go away for weeks at a time and even years and no matter what the weather does, hot or cold, the system will change it's behavior to preserve the temperature I have set for it. It is completely understandable that all these changes going on in my house A/C system need no input from an outside agent to keep it going. That's an amazing thing but have I really demonstrated no need for an outside intelligent agent? No not at all; in fact think of the incredible invention, design and building process that went on for years to make it possible for my house to work this way. There was most definitely a design and a designer. But is there no need for any outside agent after everything gets started? If I go away for months at a time, I still need to pay my utility bill. But the "scientist" trying to observe whether any outside agent were fiddling with things at my house would never know about this.

Speaking of bait and switch which I have just accused the evolutionist of, I was reading an article just now accusing the Intelligent Design movement of the same thing. The article's argues that the ID proponents such as Behe and Dembski insist that their criticism of Darwinism is not religiously motivated, that they are simply pointing out the flaws in the evolutionary science. It quotes Dembksi as saying "Design requires neither magic nor miracles nor a creator." And the article quotes Behe--"Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer." But the article then claims that although they claim no need for a particular designer they obviously are implying God. Inference of Design is the bait, God is the switch.

This is an interesting argument because it recognizes the obvious that if there is a design in nature there must be a God. And this from an atheist! He assumes that if God is the conclusion of these men's scientific pursuit then it must be invalid science. How absurd is that?! Truth is disallowed if truth leads us to God.

Actually, I am inclined to agree with the article about Behe and Dembski. They are useful to me because they have made some wonderful arguments against Darwinism. But I too think it is clearly a copout to say that that their conclusion of the need for a designer need not be God. And their motive is obviously the desire avoid the label of a creationist so as to give their science credence within academic circles. But they fail to do that. They are excoriated by the mainstream scientific community anyway. The have fooled no one and they have been ashamed of God in the process. I understand what they are trying to do and I am glad they are honest scientists but they might as well go ahead and say the obvious.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Take varieties of rabbits, gray, white and black, then put them in a snow covered environment. Which variety is going to predominate over many generations? That's easy, the white rabbit because they will blend in with the snow and not be seen by their predators as easily. The genes of the white rabbits will tend to be inherited by more and more offspring as they survive to the age of reproductively and mate with other white rabbits who also survive. This will continue until there are very few darker rabbits which is to say very little genetic material that creates the darker fur. This is know as adaptation. Really it is a form of mimicry. It is beneficial for the white rabbits to be able to "mimic" the white snow. The rabbits did not plan it this way, natural selection just favors them.

One wild example of mimicry is the Polyphemus Moth. This moth's coloring and patterns on its wings has an uncanny resemblance to an owl's head and face. Apparently the owl, who likes to eat moths will be fooled by the disguise and not eat the moth thinking it is actually another owl. Certainly this will benefit the moth, at least from the danger of being eaten by owls and other prey who might want to avoid tangling with an owl. Again, this moth knows nothing about it's ability to protect itself mimicking a moth; it benefits nevertheless.

The most famous example of adaptation given as a textbook example of evolution at work is the story of the Peppered Moth. There are light colored, dark colored and speckled varieties of these moths in the natural population. Evidently, these moths would hang out on the bark of trees most of which in their habitat had light colored bark. Consequently the lighter moths predominated in the same way as the white snow rabbits do. This was before the industrial revolution in England. When the factories produced enough soot over the years to turn the bark a dark color, it was noted that the darker moths began to predominate. And finally when environmentally conscious modern factories began to clean their act up, the dark bark became light again and logically the lighter moths are now predominate again. This story demonstrates the ability of a population of a certain species to genetically adapt and change their make up over many generations due to changing environmental conditions.

Does this adaptability of a species demonstrate evolution? It depends on you idea of evolution. If you mean the ability of a species to shift their gene pool over time to favor one trait over another, then yes. No problem with that. But if you mean the ability for a species to gradually become something completely different and higher in sophistication and complexity then absolutely not.

Notice that in the stories given, no moth changed it's own color, nor did any new rabbit become something other than a rabbit. Nor did any new colors turn up. The genetic variability built-in to the gene pool allowed for all the variability at the beginning of the story. No new information in the genes was produced. Instead, if anything, the gene pool tended to loose information. If all you had was white moths with no recessive genes for producing dark moths, then the dark moths would have become extinct. The fact that the pepper moths were able to shift their demographics from mostly white to mostly dark and finally mostly white again demonstrates the ability for the species to preserve themselves, not to become something other than what they were.

So adaptation is a nice feature of genetics. Is it perhaps a feature that has been designed to preserve the species during hard times? That would be what we would expect of an all-wise and gracious God.

One of the primary evidences given for evolution is homology--the observation that different species have similarities. For example, the vast majority of animals have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, two ears and four limbs. This supposedly indicates that somewhere, far back in the history of life many hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a common ancestor who had these traits and the descendants eventually split off into a variety of species.

The bone structure of many skeletal reptiles and mammals are similar. Notice for example the picture on the right. This cartoon depiction of an x-ray of an alligator's front limb, a human arm and a bird's wing respectively. You can see that the bone structure of all three share some similarities. All three have two bones in the "forearm" part of their limbs. The radius and ulna, as these bones are called, allow the end of the limb (our hand) to rotate about 200 degrees. This benefits us as well as the alligator and the bird. Other similarities are the five digits on both the alligator and human. In Darwinian evolution, these benefits were selected in the original ancestor because of it's ability to compete and survive over it's less endowed siblings and cousins who did not have such features. And then of course these traits were passed down to their descendants and continued to be preserved even in widely divergent species.

You can see that there has been an observation and then a hypothesis proposed but never tested. Such a test is impossible to make because of the extremely slow pace of the process. There is a test however. If the evolution hypothesis is true, there should be evidence in both the fossil record and in some species of life today of transitional forms. This we do not see. Stephen Jay Gould in a moment of honest reflection admitted:

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils… We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.”

There is another hypothesis. Perhaps this benefit of having two bones in the forearms of so many creatures is a design feature which was used by a wise Designer who efficiently used the same excellent design on many different kinds.