Two sides of the irreducible complexity argument: dhw Pt1 (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, September 21, 2009, 11:59 (5541 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt writes: According to conventional evolutionary theory [...] the appearance of new organisms only arrives through "need", or in other words, some environmental attribute outside the organism's control starts putting pressure on it, either through predation or through destruction of its habitat by means of any natural phenomenon. [..] So that's what I mean that evolution only seems to happen when it has to. It is this particular segment of evolution that David (and you?) seem to be at odds with.-I can only speak for myself, but this is not the segment that I am at odds with. Allowing for the fact that those original self-replicating molecules possessed the astonishing potential for all this adaptation (George objects, but if that's how life started, there could have been no evolution without it), I have no problem with that principle, which is what both you and David have referred to as passive evolution, i.e. organisms reacting to changing conditions. After the problem of the origin of life itself, the evolutionary stumbling block for me is not adaptation but innovation.-My starting point is always the first self-replicating molecules. My finishing point (not necessarily the finishing point) is us. If the theory of evolution is true ... and I think it is ... there has to be an unbroken line between blobs of matter that merely reproduced themselves, and us with our senses, sexual organs, heart, lungs, nervous system, brain etc. At one time these did not exist. And yet I am expected to believe that blind, mindless blobs of matter were able somehow to combine themselves in such a way that not only did they manage to reproduce themselves and come to life, but they were also able ... over a vast period of time and in stages from rudimentary (though functioning) to complex ... to bring all the above from non-existence to existence. For instance, what need was there for the first light-sensitive nerve? Come to that, what need was there for light-sensitive nerves to develop into the hitherto non-existent sense of sight? The advantages are clear, but those came after the event.-Your account of evolution seems to begin at a point where the basic structures already exist. Once the mechanism (apologies to George) for adaptation is in place, evolution follows, and natural selection ensures a degree of improvement. But every single feature (a) of that mechanism, and (b) of the faculties etc. that evolution works on, had to begin from scratch. And that entails chance mutations, which somehow no longer seem to figure in your "conventional evolutionary theory". In the context of chance v. design this brings us back, of course, to the monkey on the typewriter, and what you can and can't believe.