A comment on a talk by Stephen Meyer
Incremental Change. Neo-Darwinian Evolution ("NDE") relies upon
incremental change to create increased functionality. Leaving aside the
teleological implications of this quaint Victorian idea of the ever-improving
organisms, we have a systems problem. Fortunately biology is now moving to a
'systems' perspective. Organisms, indeed, the cell itself, is a complex
orchestration of interacting systems, all with efficiently interacting
interfaces and distinct boundaries and in a non-deterministic relationship. This
means that one system is not necessarily benefited by the development of a
function in another system which needs its input, e.g. muscles don't 'care' if
there is a visual system, but are relied upon as a component of the visual
system's global operation).
So a 'new' feature is not merely a 'light sensitive skin patch' as per dear
Dawkin's supposed evolution of the eye but to afford a putative survival
advantage (and why is this important?), the photons incoming need to be
processed, the outputs of the process that turn light into neurological input,
this output needs to be integrated into a further processing system that can
create outputs that benefit the organism: avoid threats, find food, etc. These
benefits also need a corresponding interlocking cascade of capabilities to
actually achieve the (potential) benefit. Skeletal changes similarly: the
autonomic nervous system and its muscle control pathways, connections and
formations need to be adapted to the new skeletal geometry to make it
functionally beneficial.
As in any system, all this needs to happen without degrading current
systems, or imposing an energy burden on the creature. Point mutations won't do
it; we need grand scale coupled inter-system changes that at each step confer
benefits on the organism. To do this, the DNA-RNA control system needs new
control instructions to create the required coordinated changes across multiple
inter-acting systems and sub-systems. From whence do they come?
NDE remains at the mercy of Darwin's original naive (Victorian) gross
morphology fiction and so provides no credible means of satisfying its own
requirements and meeting its own claims. It is dead in the water from the get go
and about as unscientific as one could get.
And don't start me on 'natural selection'. This is a tendentious fiction.
All nature does is systematically cull those organisms with fewer comparative
beneficial 'functions' for a particular environment. Darwin has given us a
killing machine, not a flourishing biota.
