The Smallest Is Not the Simplest

More Time, Please

We have made reference to the discombobulation taking place in the Academy over the speculative theories of Evolutionism.  No-one takes Darwinism seriously any more.  OK--that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the greatest advocates for it these days are more likely to be non-scientists, publicists, politicians or media starlets [using the term in a gender neutral sense.]

The Chattering Classes find comfort and solace in continuing to embrace Evolutionism: scientists not so much.  One reason for the scientific discomfort arises out of the labs where electron microscopes are deployed to investigate living cells.  Electron microscopes represent a technological advance, allowing researchers to study heretofore hidden aspects of living cells.  It has produced an entirely new scientific discipline: microbiology.

The Evolutionist paradigm has (allegedly) primitive lifeforms being simple and basic.  As chance does its wondrous work, eventually the primitive life form becomes more and more complex.  Higher life forms self-evolve into being.  Amazing! said the elephant.  This just-so story, repeated endlessly and illustrated with sparkling pictures of amoeba evolving into glorious racing horses, has to be most certainly true, because it looks so marvellous, glorious, and grand.  It turns out it's nothing more than a fairy story.  But in previous generations scientists embraced it with all the fervour of religious devotees.  Besides, it helped them find work.

Now the disciplines and discoveries of micro-biology have exploded the myths.
 Biochemical professor Michael Behe writes:

At the tiniest levels of biology--the chemical life of the cell--we have discovered a complex world that radically changes the grounds on which Dawinian debates must be contested.  [Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p.31. 

He adds later:

. . . as biochemists have begun to examine apparently simple structures like cilia and flagella, they have discovered apparently simple structures like cilia and flagella, they have discovered staggering complexity, with dozens or even hundreds of precisely tailored parts. . . . As the number of required parts increases, the difficulty of gradually putting the system together skyrockets, and the likelihood of indirect scenarios plummets.  Darwin looks more and more forlorn.

New research on the roles of the auxiliary proteins cannot simplify the irreducibly complex system.  The intransigence of the problem cannot be alleviated; it will only get worse.  Darwinian theory has given no explanation for the cilium or flagellum.  The overwhelming complexity . . . push us to think it may never give an explanation.  [Ibid., p.73.]

The dyed-in-the-wool Darwinian, faced with such hard scientific data within the simplest structures of life, is required to come up with a testable explanation of how such complexity randomly evolved into being.  Leaning back in the chair, puffing on the professorial pipe, and proclaiming, "Evolution, my boy", no longer cuts it.  The hard data has exploded that particular myth.

Behe goes on to hypothesize why this is the case:

When is it reasonable to conclude, in the absence of firsthand knowledge or eyewitness accounts, that something has been designed?  For discrete physical systems--if there is not a gradual route to their production--design is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components.  The greater the specificity of the interacting components required to produce the function, the greater is our confidence in the conclusion of design. [Ibid., p. 194.]

Let's put that in the negative, to illustrate why Evolutionism is exposed, with no clothes.

When is it reasonable to conclude, in the absence of firsthand knowledge or eyewitness accounts, that something has come into existence by chance?  For discrete physical systems there has to be a gradual route to their production, because our theory of Evolutionism requires such an assumption.  We now know this gradual process produced a coalescence of interacting components within the tiniest cell--from dozens to hundreds of them--randomly to accomplish a function beyond each individual, discrete component.  The greater the specificity of the interacting components required to produce the function, the greater the length of time required to produce such complexity to where the whole is far, far greater than the sum of the individual parts.  And since Evolutionism is the only game in town, that it the only explanation we can give.  More time, please.  Lots and lots of it.

More time is the only warrant left for Evolutionism.   With each new exposure of sub-cellular complexity, the only recourse is for Evolutionists--when asked to explain how this occurred by chance--is to plead for more time, a longer process.   Which, to put it mildly, makes them forlorn and pathetic figures.  How many billion years is the age of the Earth up to now?  Darwin reckoned that a few hundred million years would account for the emergence of life as we know it today.  His successors and intellectual descendants are now talking 15 billion years for the Big Bang Universe.

And as the complexity of individual cells, along with all their interacting, mutually dependant, yet discrete parts have become known, we are probably getting up to 50 billion years for Evolutionism to warrant all the manifold complexity of the smallest, simplest cell via random processes and chance.

What's a few billion years amongst friends?