The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [113]
Suddenly, I felt a personal stake in the topic. “Tell me more,” I said.
“The real trick with blood clotting isn’t so much the clot itself—it’s just a blob that blocks the flow of blood—but it’s the regulation of the system,” he continued.
“If you make a clot in the wrong place—say, the brain or lung—you’ll die. If you make a clot twenty minutes after all the blood has drained from your body, you’ll die. If the blood clot isn’t confined to the cut, your entire blood system might solidify, and you’ll die. If you make a clot that doesn’t cover the entire length of the cut, you’ll die. To create a perfectly balanced blood-clotting system, clusters of protein components have to be inserted all at once. That rules out a gradualistic Darwinian approach and fits the hypothesis of an intelligent designer.”
Surely, I thought to myself, there must be another way. “Some scientists have proposed that a process called ‘gene duplication’ can account for the creation of new components for complex biological systems,” I said. “Why wouldn’t that work with blood clotting?”
Gene duplication can happen during the process of cell division when DNA is being copied from the original cell for use in the new cell. Occasionally, the process goes awry and a piece of DNA, perhaps a gene, is copied twice. This creates an extra gene. While the original gene can go about its pre-assigned role, the extra gene can drift and perhaps create a new function. Some scientists have theorized that this is how new components might be created for irreducible systems.
“Sure, gene duplication happens,” Behe replied. “But what the fans of gene duplication rarely recognize is that when you get a duplicated gene, you don’t get a new protein with new properties. You’ve got the same protein as before. And that’s a problem.”
I was having difficulty seeing why. “Could you explain that?” I asked.
He glanced down at the mousetrap, which was still sitting on his desk. “Let’s go back to the mousetrap analogy,” he said. “Suppose you have a one-component mousetrap, with two ends of a metal spring being bent and pressing against each other under tension so that if a mouse disturbs them, they’ll slip and spring and hopefully catch a paw or tail. And say you wanted to develop a more efficient two-component trap that has a wooden base as well as the spring.
“According to the concept of gene duplication, you would make a copy of the first spring. Now you’ve got two springs—except the second spring somehow becomes a wooden base. Do you see the conceptual disconnect? You can’t just say the spring somehow morphs into a wooden base without doing more than just saying, ‘gene duplication did it.’ The problem is, Darwinists don’t provide the details of how this can actually happen in the real world.
“When one scientist tried to come up with a step-by-step scenario of how blood-clotting could have developed, he couldn’t avoid generalizing by saying a component suddenly ‘appears,’ or ‘is born,’ or, ‘arises,’ or, ‘springs forth,’ or ‘is unleashed.’ 12 What’s causing all of this springing forth and unleashing? There’s no meaningful explanation of what could have caused these steps to take place. These are details that doom these scenarios.
“And there are a lot more problems than that. How can blood clotting develop over time, step by step, when in the meantime the animal has no effective way to stop from bleeding to death whenever it’s cut? And when you’ve only got part of a system in place, the system doesn’t work, so you’ve got the components sitting around doing nothing—and natural selection only works if there is something useful right now, not in the future.
“Besides, at best the explanations that some people attempt are mere word pictures. In science we’re supposed to do experiments to show something is true. Nobody has ever done experiments to