The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [111]
I asked, “Has anyone been able to propose a step-by-step evolutionary explanation of how a gradual process could have yielded a flagellum?”
“In a word—no,” he said with a chuckle. “For most irreducibly complex systems, the best you get is a sort of hand-waving, cartoonish explanation, but certainly nothing that approaches being realistic. Even evolutionary biologist Andrew Pomiankowski admitted: ‘Pick up any biochemistry textbook, and you will find perhaps two or three references to evolution. Turn to one of these and you will be lucky to find anything better than ‘evolution selects the fittest molecules for their biological function.’ 10
“But for the flagellum, there aren’t even any cartoon explanations. The best the Darwinists have been able to muster is to say that the flagellum has components that look like the components of other systems that don’t have as many parts, so maybe somehow this other system had something to do with the flagellum. Nobody knows where this subsystem came from in the first place, or how or why the subsystem may have turned into a flagellum. So, no, there’s no reasoned explanation anyone has been able to offer.”
I tried another approach. “What about Darwinists who say, ‘Maybe it’s merely too early for us to come up with a road map of how these gradual changes developed. Someday we’ll better understand the flagellum, so have patience—in the end, science is going to figure it out.’ ”
Behe leaned back in his chair. “You know, Darwinists always accuse folks in the Intelligent Design movement of making an argument from ignorance. Well, that’s a pure argument from ignorance! They’re saying, ‘We have no idea how this could have happened, but let’s assume evolution somehow did it.’ You’ve heard of ‘God-of-the-gaps’—inserting God when you don’t have another explanation? Well, this is ‘evolution-of-the-gaps.’ Some scientists merely insert evolution when they don’t understand something.
“Look—we may not understand everything about these biological systems, but we do know some things. We do know that these systems have a number of very specifically matched components that do not lend themselves to a gradualistic explanation. We know that intelligence can assemble complex systems, like computers and mousetraps and things like that. The complexity we see is not going to be alleviated by the more we learn; it can only get more complicated. We will only discover more details about the systems.
“Here’s an illustration. Let’s say you have a car in a dark garage. You shine a flashlight on one part of the engine and you see all of its components and its obvious complexity. Shining the flashlight on another part of the motor isn’t going to make the first part go away. It isn’t going to make the problem any simpler; it’s going to make it more complicated. And as we discover more about the flagellum, it won’t negate the complexity we’ve already found. All we’ll have is an even more complicated, more impressive, more interdependent machine—and an even greater challenge to Darwinian theory.”
MOLECULAR TRUCKS AND HIGHWAYS
According to Behe, the cilium and bacterial flagellum are just the beginning of the Darwin-defying complexity in the microscopic world of the cell. One of his other favorites is the “intra-cellular transport system.”
“The cell is not a simple bag of soup, with everything sloshing around,” he said. “Instead, eukaryotic cells—cells of all organisms except bacteria—have a number of compartments, sort of like rooms in a house.
“There’s the nucleus, where the DNA resides; the mitochondria, which produce energy; the endoplasmic reticulum, which processes proteins; the Golgi apparatus, which is a way station for proteins