Nature is the source of many animals and plants that appear to have been designed, and designed very well. There are many examples of design that seem unreasonable when looked at through the evolutionary perspective of gradual change. Other examples are better explained by the creation model, because of the fact that a Creator is not required to create everything strictly for the purposes of survival and reproduction. A Creator has the right to display His creativity and ingenuity through His work, and this is what the following examples will demonstrate.
Step by step? No way!
Darwin once 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. But I can find out no such case” (Darwin, 1993:232). So, according to Darwin, evolution would collapse if an organ existed which could not be brought about in small steps. This challenge could just as well apply to any organism, tissue, cell, or biological process. If any of these were found which could not have come about by many small modifications this would break down the theory of evolution. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Blood clotting is a process that is vital to human existence. If you got a small cut and your blood did not form a clot, you could die from the blood loss. Here is the problem, the process of blood clotting requires 20-30 steps, and removing or changing one of them could already lead to death (Brown, 1996:11). The whole process must be in place to keep humans alive, but evolution says everything evolved in small steps. Since the complete process of blood clotting is vital to human existence, evolution by small steps fails.
Evolutionists understand the implications of the blood clotting example above, and so they have tried to give their explanations. Let us hear it from Richard Dawkins, “More generally, there are many structures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survive the subtraction of any part, but which were built with the aid of scaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longer visible. Once the structure is completed, the scaffolding can be removed safely and the structure remains standing. In evolution, too, the organ or structure you are looking at may have had scaffolding in an ancestor which has since been removed” (Dawkins, 2006:129). This would be a nice explanation if it was actually observed, but in reality this explanation only pushes the problem to some supposed phenomena in the past which is unobservable today. You cannot prove something in science if it is not observable and repeatable, thus Dawkin’s explanation is merely speculation, not science.
Carnivorous plants are plants that “eat” insects and creatures like spiders. Some examples are the Venus fly trap and the pitcher plant. These plants have sensors to detect their prey and stimulate the trap to close quickly. If we consider evolution in small steps, the question arises as to whether a developing plant would ever catch anything. A quick response is necessary to catch prey, but how would an evolving plant gain this speed without tasting some success in its early evolution?
A liver fluke is a parasite which has a complicated life cycle. I will quote at large to preserve the details of this account, “Consider the life cycle of the liver fluke. The adult lives in the intestine of a sheep. After the eggs are laid they pass with the faeces onto the ground. The eggs hatch, giving rise to small ciliated larvae which can swim about in water. If the larvae are lucky they find a pond snail: they must do this to survive, for the snail is the vehicle for the next stage in the life cycle of the liver fluke. Having found a snail the larvae finds its way into the pulmonary chamber or lung. Here it loses its cilia and its size increases. At this stage it is known as a sporocyst. While in this condition it buds off germinal cells into its body cavity which develop into a second type of larvae known as rediae. These are oval in shape, possessing a mouth and stomach and a pair of protuberances which they use to move about. The rediae eventually leave the sporocyst, entering the tissue of the snail, after which they develop into yet another larval form known as cercariae which appear superficially to resemble a tadpole. Using their long tails these tadpole-like larvae work their way through and eventually out of the snail and onto blades of grass, where each larva sheds its tail and encases itself in a sheath. Eventually they are eaten by a sheep. Inside the sheep they find their way to the liver where they develop sexual organs and mature into the adult state. They finally leave the sheep’s liver and migrate to the intestine where they mate and so complete their extraordinary life cycle” (Denton, 1996:221). This remarkable life cycle relies on so many factors working together, and any failure could lead to extinction. Can small, successive changes possibly give a reasonable explanation?
Complexity beyond comprehension
Many examples of complex design are simply better explained by the creation model. These examples better demonstrate ingenuous design versus evolution for the sake of reproduction and survival.
Derivate work from original photo: אורן פלס Oren Peles Derivative work: User:MathKnight [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
Bats are an engineering marvel. Bats rely on their supersonic squeaks to find their prey, and these flying radars beat any man-made device. “The frequency of its supersonic squeaks is almost 70,000 cycles per second and it emits, in flight, up to 100 squeaks per second. The bat distinguishes between its squeaks (which are coded differently in different species) and their echoes by the use of an ingenious mechanism: a small muscle in the outer-ear passage automatically contracts and closes the ear passage every time a squeak is emitted (at intermittent periods of as little as 1/200 of a second), so only the echo is detected…. It can ‘see’ prey, such as a fruit-fly, up to 100 feet away by echo location and catch four or five in a second. And this whole auditory system weighs a fraction of a gram! Ounce for ounce, watt for watt, it is millions of times more efficient and more sensitive than the radars and sonars contrived by man” (Pitman, 1984:219). It would take much faith to believe that natural selection chose all the appropriate mistakes (mutations) to produce such a complex marvel.
Darwin once said, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree” (Darwin, 1993:227). This statement is just as valid today as it was in the days of Darwin. After Darwin another discovery was made about the complexity of human eyes. Human eyes involuntarily make small rotary motions (Cornsweet, 1970:400). What is the reason for these motions called “microsaccades”? Without these motions the human eye would gray out any part of an image that did not move (Cornsweet, 1970:405). So if we stared at something that didn’t move, we would very quickly see a gray screen. But these motions “refresh” the image that our eyes see, which allows us to stare without losing sight of our object. The human eye is truly a wonder. We may understand a lot more about the human eye and how it works today, but this only makes it more challenging for evolution to explain.
Yet another complexity which is better explained by the creation model is the human brain. One can’t help but try to find something to compare the brain with, “Even if only one hundredth of the connections in the brain were specifically organized, this would still represent a system containing a much greater number of specific connections than in the entire communications network on Earth” (Denton, 1996:330-331). The human brain not only amazes us with the number of specific connections it contains, but also with its compactness and efficiency, “Yet the whole device fits in a 1 liter box and uses only about 10 watts of power” (Peterson, 1995). Only 10 watts of power! The average desktop computer consumes about 65 – 250 watts (Bluejay, 2008). It is important to note though, here we are comparing the human brain to other intelligently designed systems and computers, but what are we to think of it if there were no intelligence behind the human brain, as evolution suggests?
Now when we speak of efficiency, we typically think about producing the most output for the least amount of energy. But let us consider the efficiency of multitasking genes, “In the house mouse, nearly every coat-colour gene has some effect on body size. Out of seventeen x-ray induced eye colour mutations in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, fourteen affected the shape of the sex organs of the female, a characteristic that one would have thought was quite unrelated to eye colour. Almost every gene that has been studied in higher organisms has been found to effect [sic?] more than one organ system, a multiple effect which is known as pleiotropy” (Denton, 1996:149). This is an example of efficiency beyond comprehension, but what about the compactness of DNA storage? All the information needed to code for all the organisms that have ever lived could fit in a teaspoon with room left over (Denton, 1996:334)! Surely such efficiency is not a requirement for successful reproduction, but then how could it have come about by evolution?
Michael Pitman summed up the whole “amazing design” argument quite neatly, “The acts of creation, like the acts of macro-evolution, are elusive; the products of creation – call them creatures or creaturae – are not. If you examine a machine (creatura), you may have difficulty in understanding how it was created. This will not stop you believing that it was made, and made to designs which, properly examined, may tell you much of the mind behind them. Does the machine work economically and efficiently? Is it readily repaired and reproduced? Does it do its job well? If so, there is evidence of good design and a praiseworthy designer. Why not apply the same reasoning to biological creaturae, says the creationist, and be prepared to accept that jellyfish, like jet engines, can be intelligently (and superbly) designed?” (Pitman, 1984:28).
Works Cited
Bluejay, Michael. “How much electricity do computers use?” Saving Electricity. June 2008. 26 August, 2009 <http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html>.
Brown, Walter T., Jr. In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood. (Special Edition) Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation, 1996.
Cornsweet, Tom N. Visual Perception. New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1970.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. First Paperback Edition. New York: Random House, 1993.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.
Denton, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. (Paperback edition) Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler Publishers Inc., 1996.
Lloyd, F. E. The Carnivorous Plants. Waltham, Massachusetts: Chronica Botanica Co., 1942: 7.
Peterson, Ivars. “PetaCrunchers: Setting a course toward ultrafast supercomputing.” Science News Online. 15 April 1995. 10 February 2008 <http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_edpik/mc_2.htm>.
Pitman, Michael. Adam and Evolution. London: Rider & Company, 1984.