Creationist questions from a creationist

Let me ask you - how would you go about proving that an organ could not evolve through slight modifications over time?That a given organ fails if certain components are removed is not significant in this regard. If I have a jenga tower, and I pull a block out of the bottom, it falls over. But yet, I can build the tower one block at a time. Since the removal of some components causes catastrophic failure, does that mean the tower is "irreducably complex"? No, not really. In fact what it means is that we'll have an easier time determining an evolutionary pathway for a certain organ, because other potential pathways are eliminated because they don't "construct" the organ in the right order.I.e. if I see a jenga tower, and I know that the blocks on top fail without blocks on the bottom, I know that it was assembled starting with the blocks on the bottom.

Yeah, the thing is, Behe more or less ignores/was ignorant of the fact that we find simpler versions of the clotting cascade in ancient organisms like horseshoe crabs. So it's not really "irreducibly complex" after all. That's the pattern with the IC argument, after all - time after time, a system creationists thought was IC turns out to have a "reduced" form after all. It's not the same fish. It's a different species. "Coelacanth" refers to an order of fish, and, as such, is no more significant in it's continued existence than it's significant to say that there are "still" mammals.So-called "living fossils" just aren't the stumbling block you seem to think they are. The Theory of Evolution doesn't say that all organisms must evolve. It simply says that, over time, organisms either adapt to their environment or they die out. What happens when an organism gets adapted to an environment that doesn't change? The organism doesn't substantially change, either. It's pretty simple, really. Random mutation. What exactly do you need to have explained? Remember, evolution happens because of two things: random, heritable mutation; and natural selection. Anything that reproduces imperfectly - with the occasional, inheritable error - and doesn't always survive long enough to reproduce, evolves. Evolving is as simple as reproducing with some mistakes. What, like transgenic genetic engineering? We do that all the time.The reason you can't viably mate with a chimpanzee is because there's mechanisms that separate species. Differing chromosome counts, for instance. But no mechanism prevents the insertion of genes from one animal to another (or even animal to plant!). This basic compatability of DNA is a very compelling argument for common ancestry. Because organisms that have eyes do way better than those that don't? Remember the expression "In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king"?Nature doesn't "give" us things. We have the things we do because the organisms that had those things left way more offspring than those that didn't.

Well, let me kind of walk you through a potential evolutionary pathway for the evolution of the eye.The most basic eye is a patch of light-sensitive cells somewhere on the organisms body. That lets it tell the difference between light and dark, and even get an idea when objects are close. So it's advantagous to have such a patch. Now, set the patch in a kind of bowl-shaped depression - now, the "eye" can distinguish direction of light. What an improvement! Deepen the depression until it's actually a cavity with a small hole at the top and a big patch of light-sensing cells lining the bottom (a primitive retina). Now it starts to work like a pinhole camera. As the pinhole gets smaller and smaller, the organism discovers that a drop of water on the hole has immense utility as a lens. The organism's decendants get so adapted to drops of water sitting on their pinhole eyes that they develop membranes over the drop to hold it in place. Now we're really cooking. Muscles around the edge of the lens allow it to change focal length, and as the light-sensitive cells specialize, they adapt into several different types, each sensing a different aspect of light. The rest of the way to the human eye is pretty simple, after that.As you can see you can get a great eye with small improvements over time.

But how would you determine that an organ was IC after the fact? Especially if there's components of the organ that can be removed with minimal effect to the organ.And the function of organs doesn't always remain the same over evolutionary time scales. For instance the lungs you have were originally swim bladders in our fishy ancestors.It's a common aphorism of the IC crowd to ask "What's the use of half a lung?" The rebuttal is, of course, "That depends on which half."

Oh.Well, I guess evolution is wrong, then. Kent Hovind, sign me up!

Grass makes cats throw up. That's why they eat it, to puke up hairballs. There's no way it could supply all their dietary needs.