He is saying that biochemical systems are "irreducibly complex" because they cease to function if just a single part of the system is missing. The implication is, of course, that these systems could not have evolved because the supposed evolutionary precursor would have at least one part missing and therefore would not function.
If that is the argument, it is like saying a television isn't intelligently designed because of the exact same issue.
And again it makes some sort of bizzare assumption that POOOOOOOOF just everything arose at once.
If mytochodria function in the cell enviroment that does not mean that a long time ago the precedant organism were not cabable of
a. function in a non-complex cell.
b. capable of functioning outside a cellular enviroment
And in fact they have a DNA stream that would indicate existance prior to encapsulation of the mytochodria.
We do not have any idea what was happening in the cambrian and precambrian on a chemical level, many of the life forms evolving in the cambrian seem to have been incorporated into other organsims, it is as though there was this competion to just produce life forms of varing complexity. Many of cambrian organisms look like the internal structures of more complex creatures, in form , and texture at any rate. So it is not unlikely that successful organisms began to be subsumed into the gene pool.
We have absolutely no clues as to what the biochemistry of early life was like at all , some we can not even speculate upon how many precursors there might have been to the current DNA/RNA complex. The internet is capable of a wide variety of communications in the way that a highly evolved oragansim is, just because it can interact with a plethora of other technology does not exclude the internet from being randomly and intelligently designed to give rise to it's irreducable complexity.
ID seems to assert that DNA/RNA had to exist the way it is and could not have evolved to the form we see now, this is a crucial step to it becoming a demonstrable theory.
BillJoe, I do not know your stance on ID, I do not mean to flame you, just critique the irreducable complexity argument.
During embrogenesis, these biochemical systems have to develop from scratch. If none of the systems are functional until fully developed, how could anything get off the ground?
This does not appear to me to be a statement of fact.
The embryo does not start from scratch, it is composed and created from two zygotes in sexual reproduction. They are structured, complex and interwoven. they are composed of a wide vaiety of parts and peices, they contain structure and information.
Modern embryos develop inside the parent oraganism and are dependant upon the structure of the parent for creation.
To wit, they do not arise from scratch.
Each step in biology is one that could have arosen through the gradual accumulation of traits.
A billion years is a very long time, say that you have a set of two chemicals, organisms or doohickeys. If the set of two doohickeys interacts every million years and there is a one in a million change of the interaction and of the two doohickeys creating a successful thingamabob, there is a .001 chance of producing a thingamabob. And that is for a set of only two.
How many chemicals existed in the precambriam sea? How many years did they have to interact? If we raise the number of chemicals in the sets to a thousand each and give them the chance of making a thingamabob over a billion years then the chances of multiple thingamabobs is very high.
Then good old natural selection could step in, even in small sets that no where reach the scales of the oceans, the chances that chemicals arise that catalyze and create a set of self catalyzing chemicals is very high. Because doohickeys and thingamabobs will be selected from the total sets to have higher percentages of interactions and leading to further interactions.
So over two billion years and sets of chemical interactions in the millions, what are the chances that self replicating structures will arise if they are in enviormments that support thier inetractions over very large sets of interaction and two billion years?
Self replicating structure arise from the void no more than galaxies and photons might have, they are the consequence , possibly, of merely the existance of large sacale structures of great size , scope and magnitude , like the earth and the universe.
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