Back to irreducible complexity (PART TWO) (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 09, 2010, 16:42 (5400 days ago) @ xeno6696


> I've gone over exactly why Dembski's premises are wrong, he's calculating the odds of a single linear combination of events, as if there was only a single attempt at each step. This clearly wouldn't be the case with or without a designer. His formula also doesn't talk about time, which is something that he would absolutely need to provide. -
I know he doesn't use time, but that is the "climbing Mt. Improbable" approach, which implies given enough time anything can happen. But Dembski's approach, in which he combines proteins to make a flagellum, involves so many thousands of required units, he comes up with those improbable numbers. The flagellum is very complex and has what I would call bushings and rotors as well as the sliding molecules that make up a wavy flagellum itself. It is in every sense a micro-motor.- I'm not such the one-time shot is such a bad approach in theory, with only 10^18 seconds of history to the universe, and the time for life to work on itself and make a flagellum starts only 3.6 billion years ago (not figuring the available seconds used before the need for a flagellum arose in evolution. We probably had amoebas first). If one 'climbs', what do we get first, a useless rotor, sliding proteins? I see this as irreducible complexity, a la' Behe. The inbetween stages are impossible to imagine if they present no function to help preserve them as time passes.They must develop simultaneously and provide some meaningful use. On the other hand there are exaptations in evolution, which look like pre-planing, hang around useless for as much as 200,000 years and then a use is found. Evolution describes these things with no Darwinian explanation, except from folks like J. Shapiro, who talks about changes driven by environmental challenges. But 200,000 years earlier? (I think I'm right, in my memory, that the human larynx dropped in position, that much earlir before speech developed).