I dedicate this short post to our great UD President Barry Arrington, who is a poker player.
Evolutionists usually claim that prerequisite for Darwinian evolution is a single self-replicating thing capable of heritable variations. From such thing evolution produced all life forms, from ameba to whales, by means of small random variations and natural selection.
Just for fun, we could metaphorically see evolution as a particular “poker game”, with the following correlations:
(1) The dealer deals shuffled cards to the players. This shuffling is analogous to the genotypic random variations.
(2) The active players show their cards, and the owner of the best five-card hand wins. These players are analogous to the phenotypes, the organisms that fight for survival.
(3) Players who fold and discard their cards are analogous to natural selection, by which traits that do not confer an advantage are discarded, while advantageous traits are selected for and are passed on
(4) Higher organisms have a number of cells ranging from 10^12 to 10^16. Roughly a five-card hand has a number of molecules of that order. Any card has a pattern which identifies the card value. In our poker/evolution metaphor the patterns in a five-card hand are symbolically analogous to the specifications of the main large apparatuses of an higher organism.
(5) Now, to make more precise our metaphor we must recall two things evolutionists state: at the beginning of evolution there is only a self-replicating thing; evolution works by small random variations in such primitive thing and its offspring. The small random variations are at the level of molecules. So it would be fully inappropriate to consider the dealer as a provider of cards in their entirety. Because in the metaphor complete cards are symbols of entire apparatuses with billion cells. Consequently, in our metaphor necessarily the dealer must provide/shuffle molecules of cards, not complete cards, to the players.
Conclusion
Like incomplete and unspecified card patterns confer no advantage to a poker player, analogously, biological irreducibly complex systems missing some parts confer no advantage to an organism. Example: a fragment of white card with only a black pixel in the corner is not a valid and recognizable card; analogously an organism with a genotypic variation cannot account for, say, an entire functioning cardiovascular or nervous system, arising ex abrupto. Such useless things would be discarded by the poker player / natural selection.
As a consequence, the players will never have winning card hands. In all sessions, they will always be forced to discard what they have in their hands. No complete poker game will ever begin. Darwinian poker is eliminative, not constructive. In short Darwinian poker is a non game.
This poker metaphor somehow shows why not only Darwinian evolution cannot produce biologic complex IC systems, let alone organisms, but why it is a process that cannot even begin the job.
A final poker concept remains to be placed in the metaphor: the bluff. Imagine a player who makes us believe he has a straight flush while having in his hands only some molecules of card. That is Darwin’s bluff – the biggest bluff in history – the claim to be able to create all life forms by unguided evolution, while it cannot produce the least organized system of the smallest living being.