"Some evolutionists have vulgarized the Intelligent Design explanation as a ‘jackpot or nothing’ one. But that is exactly what it is, and evolutionists have failed to show how the emergence of a complex biological structure can be anything other than ‘jackpot or nothing’.
Evolutionists have argued that biological systems only appear to be irreducibly complex because these systems once had possessed numerous redundancies that enabled the components to function independent from each other. These redundancies have since been removed by evolutionary processes, leaving the remaining components in a state of lockstep dependence upon each other—hence the apparent irreducible complexity.
--To begin with, the explanation is ad hoc. There is no evidence for any such one-time grand redundancies, and, if they are going to pooh-pooh the Intelligent Design explanation, the burden of proof is on the evolutionists to show that they once existed.
--Note also that spot redundancies should not be confused with the hypothesized grand redundancies that presumably governed the whole. In the Krebs cycle, for example, a few of the compounds can be synthesized by alternative pathways. The fact that parts of the Krebs cycle are redundant is very different from saying that the Krebs cycle as a whole is, or once was, redundant. The fact that there are ‘shortcuts’ within the Krebs cycle is very different from suggesting that the entire Krebs cycle can be bypassed by a shortcut.
Bergman quips:
“Reducing the cycle by one step does not negate the fact that it still requires the remaining parts of the cycle. It would not be irreducibly complex only if a single quark were responsible for the biochemical results that the Krebs cycle achieves” (p. 123).
An analogy with the automobile may help.
An analogy with the automobile may help.
The car thief can do a ‘shortcut’ around the key-starting system by short-circuiting the wires that lead to the starter motor, and driving away the car. This means that, from a mechanical point of view, the key-starting system is redundant.
However, this individual redundancy certainly does not mean that the automobile as a whole is a redundant system, much less that the automobile could spontaneously arise, step-by-step, without intelligent design."
CMI
