Ah, the prime example of quote mining. If you've been on these threads for any length of time, you'd realize that the quote above was a lead in to showing how an eye could happen by blind chance. Even the folks at Answers in Genesis know this.
And there are people outside of Answers in Genesis who are just as troubled by blind chance.
B3: Extrapolating From Small Changes -- This has no attribution but argues against small changes + time = large change
| Roland F. Hirsch For example, molecular analyses indicate that all living things fall into three domains-the Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucarya-related by descent from a common ancestor." This has been a fundamental point of Darwin's theory- stated here by its strongest adherents. Yet the microbial gene sequence information indicates it clearly is wrong, which suggests to me that the Darwinian theory itself is fundamentally, perhaps fatally flawed. Rather few cellular processes are enabled solely by the presence of a single gene product. Indeed, in some cases several different proteins must be present simultaneously, or the process does not take place at all. Such a process is called irreducibly complex. It does not occur at all unless every essential protein is present. So gradual, step-by-step evolution of the process would not work, for none of the intermediate stages would be "selected" because none of the intermediate stages would be functional. I should add that this point is supported by fundamental principles of information theory, as well as recent research that concludes that random mutations cannot create complex, biologically-specified genetic information. What is the origin of this complex specified information? Until recently it was thought that this problem of generating complex specified information could be solved by recourse to evolutionary or genetic algorithms. That hope is now dwindling as a result of the recently proven No Free Lunch theorems, which show that evolutionary algorithms fail on average to outperform blind search
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| ID Friendly Evolution This link is to an article that uses quotations from a presentation by James A. Shapiro. I was unable to find the original document and must trust that this is a faithful representation of the original. The citations are ostensibly the word of Dr. Shapiro. One of the most important questions in evolution is: How can new adaptations originate? This is a difficult question, because most evolutionary novelties, such as the eye or the wing, involve the orchestrated expression of many different loci, a number of which act in the expression of multiple phenotypes. Conventional explanations that randomly generated advantageous changes in complex characters accumulate one locus at a time are unconvincing on both functional and probabilistic grounds, because there is too much interconnectivity and too many degrees of mutational freedom. The genomic reorganization perspective, however, allows us to restate the question of adaptive novelties as : How can a complex multicomponent genomic system be assembled before screening by selection? |