Then a Miracle Happens

How can we detect design in nature? One idea, proposed by Michael Behe, is irreducible complexity. Behe explains that a machine is irreducibly complex if it has several different parts which all are necessary. Remove any one of those needed parts, and the machine doesn’t function. An internal combustion engine is irreducibly complexity, for instance. Take away the valve, or the piston, or the spark plug, or the wire, and it does not function.

Such machines are not likely to be created by blind natural laws--they require forward-looking thought. Assembly is required, and there is no payback until the final step. Evolution’s natural selection will not do the job because the machine does not help the organism until the machine is complete. Natural selection lacks the foresight required to construct such machines.

An unlikely way around this barrier is to have the different parts of the machine evolve independently, for their own purposes or perhaps for no purpose at all. Later, the parts come together to form a super machine. In other words, each part of the super machine evolves on its own, in a neutral fashion or to perform its own function. Then, serendipitously, the different machines just happen to fit together and perform a new function. Imagine a fuselage and a pair of wings uniting to form an aircraft.

This rather heroic explanation is called preadaptation, and evolutionists have relied heavily on it to explain biology's complexities. The latest example is a new paper that uses preadaptation to explain a machine that transports proteins across the mitochondria inner membrane. The evolutionists point out that two parts (proteins) have been found that are similar to two of the parts in the protein transporter super machine.

They argue that while these parts did not perform a protein transport function (and perhaps they did not perform any function at all), they indeed could perform the protein transporter job if they joined up along with another common part. The evolutionists triumphantly concluded:

These newly described proteins, TimA and TimB, function in distinct protein complexes in bacteria, yet evolved to serve as modules of a protein transport machine in mitochondria.

Here the evolutionists have over reached. There is no question that the evidence does not support anything close to this level of certainty. In fact their narrative for how this evolutionary move is supposed to have happened is firmly planted in the Darwinian just-add-water view of biology. But this should not detract from their strong points.

The paper does make reasonable arguments that the unrelated parts perhaps could work together, if configured properly and with a few modifications here and there, to perform protein transport. The argument and evidences are by no means conclusive, but they certainly are conceivable.

Scientists can debate the merits of their hypothesis. But even if correct, the hypothesis reveals a major problem with evolutionary theory. In answering the irreducible-complexity challenge, evolutionists have invoked preadaptation as their mechanism of choice, and this brings with it an enormous load of serendipity.

As indicated in the fuselage + wings = airplane analogy, the evolutionary preadaptation mechanism envisions an untold multitude of just-so stories to explain nature's incredible complexity. The protein transporter machine, and a great many others, were just fortunate accidents. Their parts just happened to be formed independently, perhaps for other purposes or perhaps for no purpose, and then happened to come together and, presto, a magnificent machine appeared. Here is how evolutionist Michael Gray credulously described it:

You look at cellular machines and say, why on earth would biology do anything like this? It’s too bizarre. But when you think about it in a neutral evolutionary fashion, in which these machineries emerge before there’s a need for them, then it makes sense.

With evolution, life simply happens. What else could Gray say? He is trying to make evolution seem reasonable at a particularly difficult point in the narrative. Parts arise on their own, ready for the right time and place to work their magic. They are recruited, modified as needed, and configured with other such parts that have arisen via a similar process. To answer the mail on complexity, evolutionists have added unbelievable addendums to their theory. It is astonishing what evolutionists are willing to swallow. This is what happens when religion drives science.