Professor Stuart Burgess: Sceptics Can’t Avoid Irreducible Complexity: They’re Standing on a Knee Joint That’s Irreducibly Complex

Prof. Stuart Burgess speaking at the recent Creation Declares conference in London.





Joel Kontinen

While evolutionists expect to see bad design, there is no such thing in nature.

Richard Dawkins was as wrong as wrong could be when he wrote about what he thought was poor design, especially when he claimed that the human eye was the work of a complete idiot.

It is actually a good example of superb design and has inspired engineers to build better cameras.

But, then, Dawkins has never designed anything.

Everything we see in nature is designed very well, even in a fallen world. Many excellent features in the animal kingdom and in us are better designed than the smart devices humans have built.

Prof. Stuart Burgess of the University of Bristol, UK, lectured on biomimetics at the recent Creation Declares conference in London.

In his talk, he quoted Charles Darwin, who said:

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

There are numerous such things, not only in animals but also in us. In addition to the dragonfly’s delicate design, birds’ wings, fish jaws, we also have something that every sceptic needs, i.e. the knee joint that is irreducibly complex.

Source:

Burgess, Stuart. 2016. Inspiration from Creation: Lessons from Biomimetics. Lecture given at the Creation Declares Conference in London, UK. (9 September).

Evolutionists Acknowledge They’re Proposing a Just So Story about Apoptosis

Apoptosis is anything but simple. Image courtesy of Pierre Fauquenot and Margaux Belhassen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).



Joel Kontinen


What would evolution be without its just so stories?

It might probably sound a bit more boring. Stories make good headlines, even if their credibility might be questionable.

Recently, the journal Current Biology published a paper entitled Just So Stories about the Evolution of Apoptosis.

Apoptosis means programmed cell death. Without it, cells would keep on living past their due dates, causing cancer and other unpleasant diseases.

The paper’s abstract says:

“Apoptosis is a form of active cell death engaged by developmental cues as well as many different cellular stresses in which the dying cell essentially ‘packages’ itself for removal. The process of apoptotic cell death, as defined at the molecular level, is unique to the Metazoa (animals).”

What it does not say is that like some molecular machines, apoptosis is irreducibly complex.

It could not have evolved through a stepwise Darwinian process. All parts had to be present at the start, or the mechanism would not work.

However, the paper attempts to explain why apoptosis can be seen in many different life forms:

“Yet active cell death exists in non-animal organisms, and in some cases molecules involved in such death show some sequence similarities to those involved in apoptosis, leading to extensive speculation regarding the evolution of apoptosis.”

Their use of the word 'speculation' seems to be an honest definition of what they are trying to do:

“Here, we examine such speculation from the perspective of the functional properties of molecules of the mitochondrial apoptotic cell death pathway. We suggest scenarios for the evolution of one pathway of apoptosis, the mitochondrial pathway, and consider how they might be tested. We conclude with a ‘Just So Story’ of how the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis might have evolved during eukaryotic evolution.”

'Just so story' might also be a befitting description of what they’re trying to do. It is often used in an attempt to keep the Divine Foot outside, as professor Richard Lewontin famously suggested.

Controlled cell death is a very complicated process. In 2002 Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for identifying genes that control apoptosis.

For more details, I would suggest you read Philip Bell’s excellent article on apoptosis in the Journal of Creation.

It shows how such a process could not have evolved.

Sources:

Bell, Philip. 2004. The non-evolution of apoptosis. Journal of Creation 18(1): 86–96.

Green, Douglas R. and Patrick Fitzgerald. 2016. Just So Stories about the Evolution of Apoptosis. Current Biology 26 (13): R620–R627 (11 July).

Paper on Irreducibly Complex Molecular Machine in Science

A recent paper in Science suggests that Michael Behe was right.


Joel Kontinen

Biochemistry professor Michael J. Behe introduced the concept irreducible complexity in his writings, especially his book Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press, 1996).

Some things, for instance, a mousetrap, just don’t work if all the necessary parts are not present from the beginning.

Ardent evolutionists did not like the concept and they claimed that the biological systems that Behe discussed could have evolved stepwise through Darwinian processes.

However, they never succeeded in demonstrating that any such systems could have arisen stepwise.

This week Science published a paper by Montana State University researchers. According to ScienceDaily they

“made a significant contribution to the understanding of a new field of DNA research, with the acronym CRISPR, that holds enormous promise for fighting infectious diseases and genetic disorders.

The MSU-led research provides the first detailed blueprint of a multi-subunit ‘molecular machinery’ that bacteria use to detect and destroy invading viruses.”

ScienceDaily quoted the paper’s lead author Blake Wiedenheft, an assistant professor at MSU's Department of Microbiology and Immunology. He said:

"We generally think of bacteria as making us sick, but rarely do we consider what happens when the bacteria themselves get sick. Viruses that infect bacteria are the most abundant biological agents on the planet, outnumbering their bacterial hosts 10 to 1.”

Wiedenheft went on to say:

“The structure of this biological machine is conceptually similar to an engineer's blueprint, and it explains how each of the parts in this complex assemble into a functional complex that efficiently identifies viral DNA when it enters the cell. This surveillance machine consists of 12 different parts and each part of the machine has a distinct job. If we're missing one part of the machine, it doesn't work."

There you have it: a paper in the pro-evolution journal Science agrees that a least one biological machine is irreducibly complex. While the paper credits evolution, its gist and its terminology speak of intelligent design, something that is becoming increasingly obvious in biological systems.

Source:

Structure of molecular machine that targets viral DNA for destruction determined. ScienceDaily, August 7, 2014.