Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny by Barrett Brown

Author:Barrett Brown [Brown, Barrett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780978721305
Publisher: Sterling & Ross Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2007-03-01T08:00:00+00:00

You know what's going to happen next. The organisms with Elements Alpha and Beta will come to dominate the population. And with so many organisms now possessing what has become a useful if imperfect system, it becomes more and more likely that, when Element Delta pops up out of a mutation, it will be popping up in an organism that can really make good use of it - an organism that is constantly hurling random insults at William Dembski. Element Delta ensures that the insults make sense, and the organism possessing all three elements has thus evolved System X, which will now flourish among the population to the point at which it is the rule, not the exception.

Of course, if we were to observe System X today and wonder how it came to be, we wouldn't know for sure how it developed. We would certainly suspect that Element Beta was developed first, but the development of Element Delta, and not Element Alpha, could have been the next step, to be followed then by Element Alpha. Or, if we were stupid, we would just give up and say that God made it.

In the real world, the sort of beneficial mutation process described above is augmented by all sorts of other important factors- errors in the process by which genes are combined during reproduction and which sometimes provide beneficial or at least neutral characteristics, the co-opting of pre-existing characteristics for new functions, gene duplication, the "brute force" successes that come with millions of years and trillions of organisms, and many other things. And the real world examples deemed to be irreducibly complex by Belie and others may be easily explained by such processes.

The bacterial flagellum, for instance, has become quite famous as of late, which is quite an achievement for any bacterial component. But the flagellum's real achievement is its complexity - utilizing several dozen protein components, this little motorized whip provides the bacteria with the ability to move around, acting as a sort of propeller. Incidentally, the flagellum derives its name from the Christian monastic practice of beating one's self with a whip, which is known as `flagellating,' and which would be a very funny thing to see firsthand. No, no, I said flagellating.

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