Do you read JunkYardBlog religiously? You really ought to. It's one of the best blogs out there, hands down. Any time I'm in a time crunch looking for a post to nominate for the Council (usually I pick one during the week, but sometimes I forget) that's where I start, because within about 5 minutes, I can usually find a post that is on par with or better than anything else I've read that week. Anyway, enough preamble. Here's what I actually have to say:
In
this post, JYB takes on evolution, creation, ID, and however else you might care to think about us getting here in one of the most calm, well reasoned, and well spoken ways I've heard in a long time. And if you were wondering, after my earlier post, what I think about evolution, the best answer may in fact be, what
he said.
The problem with the Darwinian model is that it doesn't really stand up too well to microbiology, a world Darwin knew nothing about. He built his theory watching turtles and bird beaks; he didn't know a thing about forms smaller than his microscope could see, and that's the majority of all lifeforms on earth.
In the world of microbiology, there are tiny entities made of multiple parts that cannot survive if they lose any of those parts, and there are complex micro systems that must be in entirely in place and functional in order for higher lifeforms to survive and thrive. To take just one example, humans need the ability to coagulate blood in order to survive. If we didn't have that ability, the first of our kind would have bled to death after his first fleshwound. The process of coagulation requires more than 20 separate chemicals in the blood, all of which must be present, and they are unique to that process. They don't do anything else when they're not coagulating our blood, and they must be triggered in succession at the right times or they will either act to coagulate our blood when we don't need it--forming lethal clots--or they won't act and we'd all bleed to death. The coagulation system is irreducibly complex, since it can't function without all of its parts. Take out even one chemical and it's useless. Disturb its chain reaction and we die. And why would a species' biology retain chemicals 1-20--just on the off chance that #21 is the one that makes the system work? That's not how blind nature is supposed to work.
Darwin would have that system built chemical by chemical until it worked. Meanwhile, the organism that needs that system now dies the first time it cuts itself on a blade of grass and the species never gets fruitful and multiplies, and never evolves into anything else. Do you see the problem here? Darwinian evolotion is inadequate to understanding the irreducibly complex biological systems nearly all lifeforms need to survive, systems that can't be built block by block. These systems either work in whole or not at all, and if they don't work the species dies out. Noting similarities between beaks or feet isn't going to cut it anymore. You have to understand the systems inside those feet that power the thing that walks around on them, and Darwin does a poor job of it.
This has been my objection to evolution all along. Also sexual reproduction. In my last biology class, we learned about all of the evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction. I never really understood, however, how sexual reproduction evolved. I mean, even if the first sexually reproducing male critter did manage to evolve a penis and testicles and the appropriate duct work and somehow figure out how to undergo meiosis, and not only undergo meiosis, but create cells through meiosis that were either ambulatory or had a really good delivery system (and by the way, this is one of my pet peeves about evolutionary theories as they were taught to me -- you can't "learn" meiosis, you can't "decide" to make sperm, etc! Why do all the textbooks say things like "the bacteria learned to live in the fireswamp." They're bacteria! A) they can't learn, and B) if you go into the fireswamp and die, you're dead, game over, no more learning. End rant), all in one generation (because until it all works, it's not a natural advantage, which is why under Darwin, there's no good reason for these things to randomly build up over time), he'd have to be in the same swamp/forest/field of another of his kind who had mutated in such a way as to develop all the appropriate female hardware, and not just any female reproductive organs -- the sorts that would fit with his organs, and meiosis, and her cells produced by meiosis would have to be the sorts of cells that would be receptive to combining with the sorts of cells lurking inside the male critter, and they'd have to be at the same place, at the same time in the gazillion years of evolutionary history, and have to find each other, and figure out what to do with each other once they found each other, and then "figure out" how to lay an egg or have a pregnancy or whatever it is they were equipped to do, and then those little things would have to be born both male and female and not get eaten by the nearest asexual thing or squashed or whatever, and then... yeah. Maybe you believe in chance on that level. I don't. I also don't buy lottery tickets. In any case, I'm not trying to stir up a whole evolution vs creation vs ID vs whatever else ails you debate. I just don't buy it. You can buy it. I consider it defective.
