(November 2, 2017 at 12:19 pm)Mathilda Wrote: 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.
You want to go with that analogy? You are explaining how complexity was designed and introduced by degrees by an intelligence to achieve a known purpose. That's what you are going with to explain biological evolution? Do you see the irony?
Since you brought it up, take the eye. Did you know that just one simple light-sensitive spot on a simple organism is incredibly complex. Here is a scientific description:
Quote:When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond [10^-12 sec] is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a single human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but different from, GDP.)
GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to ‘cut’ a molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative of both GDP and GTP). Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, just as a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub. (Michael Behe (biochemist), Darwin's Black Box; p.46)
Even if we presuppose an already vastly complicated cell to kick off the evolution of the eye, an eye makes absolutely no sense on its own. You need a mechanism to process the information and be able to do something about it to relate it to a survival benefit--or no increase in functionality will evolve. But wait again, you don't need a light processing center to make decision if you don't have any light sensitive information to process. What came first, the ability to move, the ability to sense light or the processing center to ascertain some survival benefit from light and effect movement? Seems like all three are needed for any survival benefit to occur. But wait, it's worse than that. For there to be an evolved increase in functionality in the eye (like to discern shapes), you would need a massively more complex processing unit for there to be any survival benefit---but what survival benefit led to the evolution of the processing unit without the complexity of the eye already present? How did that happen? For reference, this would be the "mechanism" sense of the definition of evolution which you said was fact.
BTW, this had to happen in something like 30 branches of the old tree of life all independent of each other.
