For Christians (or anyone else) who deny Darwinian evolution.

[I_am_not_mafia]

I've snipped the crap about definitions of evolution and what one person believes. It's a typical religionist tactic to get the conversation bogged down in irrelevant definitions so people are faced with a wall of text and no one making any progress. It makes it look like the debate is equal when it is not.


Learn to read.

You said "You are the one claiming that complex organs and traits evolved without any survival benefit until they were complete. No evolutionary scientist claims that, only creationists making strawman debates." Of course no evolutionary scientist claims that. They infer that it must be so.

No they do not and if you persist with your strawman arguments then please provide a citation. At every stage organs or traits are beneficial if the genes responsible for them are propagated throughout the popultion. This is why they are being propagated. Someone please post the youtube clip about how the eye evolved as an example. I had an eye operation yeterday and have only just been able to open both eyes so can't spend any length of time on my PC. I will deal with Steve's nonsense when I have recovered more.

Here's the thing, the theory is that parts can get co-opted from other systems.

That can happen but that's not primarily how complexity develops over time. I explained this in a previous post.


Let's have an example of why Steve's logic is flawed. According to the logic of irreducible complexity, the entire financial system had to be designed and popped into existence in one go, beause if you took away banks now the economy would collapse. Yet we know from history how banks developed over time. First as a way of storing your gold. Then people found that it was easier to give eah other paper promises of gold than to take it out and hand it over. Then banks realised that the gold just sat in their banks and they could lend some of it out and still be able to pay the gold to the actual owners if they ever asked for it. The gold they lent out had to be paid back with interest and so fractional reserve banking was formed. After a few bank runs, this became standardised so banks had to keepo a minimum fraction of the gold in reserve. Then the western economies left the gold standard and instead the money was not backed by a physical resource but by future earnings. Loans need to be paid back with interest, money that does not exist, yet gets paid into the lendee's bank account. This is why money gets created everytime a loan is made. This is why there will always be more debt than oney in existence.

Here's the point though, at every stage the banks were useful even though they started out simple and their operations became more complex. The rest of the economic system adapted to each stage and became dependent upon it. The same happens with ecosystems. Introduce a foreign species and the ecosystem can become dependent upon it after a while. Add a new feature to an organ or organism and other parts of the system can then adapt to become dependent upon it. But religionists like Steve refer to it as irreducibly complex without taking into accont that complexity developed over time with different parts of the system adapting to each other.