Irreducible Complexity

Bacteria demonstrate intra-species communication that is species specific using a partner with a communication molecule. Bacteria are also “multilingual” with a generic trade language for interspecies communication. Bacteria control tasks by signal producing and receiving receptors with a signal carrier. The tasks bacteria conduct depend on the concentration they sense of self bacteria versus generic species concentration. e.g. Bacteria control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. The detailed (small) sRNA required for these control mechanisms is now beginning to be desciphered. See below. Question:
Did bacteria “invent” their communication and control methods via evolutionary stochastic processes?
Or do these constitute Complex Specified Information and thus evidence design? Read More ›

Here. Why don’t they just revoke the science creds of anyone who thinks there is more to know than Darwin ((“the best idea anyone ever had”) did? Alternatively, life has moved on.

Today marks a full year since I issued an open challenge to Darwinists to ground their theory and its OOL extension and root, in light of actually observed capabilities of blind watchmaker mechanisms of chance and necessity through an essay I would host here at UD. The pivot of the challenge is the modern version of the very first Icon of Evolution, Darwin’s Tree of Life (which in an incomplete form is the ONLY image in original editions of Origin of Species), here typified by a case from the Smithsonian:   I first did so in an exchange thread, specifically responding to Jerad, then headlined it some days later. In lieu of prompt serious replies, I set up Wikipedia articles Read More ›

There are three main approaches to current origin-of-life studies – metabolism-first, replication-first, and membrane-first. The problem with each of these approaches is that they ignore the reality of irreducible complexity in self-replicating system.
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Selection after something exists is not the same as selection before something exists, except in confused, illogical thinking of Darwinists. This is the heart of the problem that Behe’s Irreducible Complexity poses for Darwinism. I once offered a Darwinist $100 if he could figure out the 40 letter password I’d written on a piece of paper and filed away. Even though it would have increased his survival advantage to figure out the password, did he figure it out? No. Did he write and evolutionary algorithm to figure it out? No. There was no free lunch for him. 🙂 The point of this exercise was to show that even though finding a solution to a problem gives one advantage, it does Read More ›

Yeah, only in Dawkins’ dreams. Look at the right atrium in these four creatures from Encyclopedia Britannica: How did that right atrium evolve from one side to the other along with changes in its connection to the pulmonary artery? In the crocodile and snake the right atrium is on the right ventricle but in the lizard and turtle they are on the left ventricle. Look at the aortas. In the lizard they are all on left ventricle, in the snake on the right ventricle, and then split for the turtles and crocodiles. How did those aortas migrate from on ventricle to the other without the transitionals being lethal? Study the picture more and you’ll see, the Intelligent Designer seems almost Read More ›

Irreducibly Complex systems are those systems (man-made or otherwise), where removal of critical core parts results in malfunction. By way of contrast, fault tolerant systems allow removal of parts or entire sub-systems, yet intended function is still retained. Removable parts or subsystems in fault tolerant architectures are also contrasted with useless parts which serve no purpose. Like spare tires, removable parts in a fault tolerant systems can still serve a purpose even if never used. From Wiki on Fault Tolerant Intelligent Design: In engineering, fault-tolerant design is a design that enables a system to continue its intended operation, possibly at a reduced level, rather than failing completely, when some part of the system fails. A fault tolerant system can be Read More ›

This my third installment of a discussion I began here and continued here on the validity of the claim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or what I call the EC-EE claim. In the first installment we looked at the EC-EE claim itself and asked whether the EC-EE claim is an example of an EC-EE claim that failed to live up to its own standard. In the second installment, we looked at what exactly are the extraordinary claims being made by ID that so require such extraordinary evidence, or is it Darwinian evolution that is really making the extraordinary claim and so far has failed the EC-EE test? In this third post I want to look at the evidentiary side Read More ›

In Illustra Media’s Darwin’s Dilemma, there is a clip on proteins as islands of function in amino acid sequence space: [youtube h38Xi-Jz9yk] Food for thought. As a stimulus to such, let us next note how the bloggist Wintery Knight has given an interesting summary of the challenges involved if a chance-dominated process is invoked for a hypothetical 100-AA polypeptide: Let’s calculate the odds of building a protein composed of a functional chain of 100 amino acids, by chance. (Think of a meaningful English sentence built with 100 scrabble letters, held together with glue) Sub-problems: BONDING: You need 99 peptide bonds between the 100 amino acids. The odds of getting a peptide bond is 50%. The probability of building a chain Read More ›