On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Anthony Jackson <ajackson@iii.com> wrote:

From: Bruce Johnson

>
> Organisms pass on their genome whole, not piecemeal. A mutation that
> severely inhibits reproductive success will likely rapidly disappear. A
> mutation that enormously improves reproductive success will probably
> spread quickly. 99.999999% of mutations are neither.

If we assume a 1% difference in reproductive success, it should take 70 generations for the prevalence of a given mutation to drop by 50%, and 1,400 generations for it to drop under 1/1,000,000. It's even worse for recessives.

 

I went and read the original link again (plus the "starting point" link, which seemed written for about an 8th grade reading level).

 

Perhaps it's my poor math skills, but it seems to me that neither side does well at proving it's case.

 

Those favoring irreducible complexity have a point that a chemical process with ~23 steps (none of which do anything alone or in any other combination of each other) is hard to justify arising randomly, yet they can't prove that it didn't: "Evolution of such a complex chemical process seems extremely unlikely, but we can't tell you definitely that it didn't occur." 

 

Those opposing irreducible complexity say that the individual components of such a process could be spread through a population as part of other functional processes but don't give any example of plausible previous processes. That lack strikes me as disingenuous, since a *functional* process using specific components that could later form a different process contradicts someone's earlier point that chemical processes are incredibly delicately balanced - if any variable differs by the slightest degree, the process does not work the same or at all.  But the opponents also say that even if these future components didn't spread as part of a different process, they could still get carried forward as non-functional junk - which is true but depends on the future-valuable junk being linked to Something Else that is selected. If not, it's prevalence would drop as per the quote above. There wouldn't be a million organisms carrying it around, waiting for the right combination of mutations to put all the pieces together. In brief, the counter argument seems to simply push the black box back one step: "This complex chemical process could have evolved randomly, but we can't give you a likely path for it."

--

Richard Aiken