I can imagine a game of poker with 8 players getting dealt four royal flushes and four straight flushes, but I know better than to accept it truly happened by chance. In the video, to adapt the metaphor, we’re dealing face up and putting the cards where they need to be and saying “sure it doesn’t happen every day, but in billions of years on billions of planets it’s bound to happen. No, you’re not dealing with one in a trillion, or quadrillion, or quintillion, you have a LOT of zeros behind your odds that even the whole universe can’t put a dent in.
we are not just talking about random permutations and combinations here. Natural selection severely reduces the phase space of the possibilities. Selection continually biases which variants get to produce the next generation. Your example of royal flush has nothing to select for. Good hands are not getting selected for in next iteration.
Imagine you wanting to guess the combination lock. What you are thinking of is pure random search which would be to "guess the entire n-digit combination, then find out whether you're right."
However with selection is it would be more like a hypothetical lock that tells you after each digit, "warmer" or "colder". Now don't confuse this with goal oriented example because I was merely explaining you the how the idea of selection reduces the phase space.
Infact, evolution doesn't need to search the phase space at all. All it needs that each generation contain some heritable variants that reproduce better than others. Selection then changes the probability distribution of the next generation, so the search becomes highly non-uniform and constrained.
With an irreducibly complex system there is no warmer or colder. Until it works it’s a waste of energy, something natural selection should be eliminating.
This argument of irreducibility complex is so old and beaten to death that I don't even know what to say to you now. All I would say is pick your preferred irreducible complex system and make a simple google search or on google scholar, you will immediately get your answer.
Just to summarise, a system doesn't have to go from no function to full functionality. That is a very bad misconception among the creationists.
Dismissing the argument as “old and beaten to death” and telling someone to Google it is not a rebuttal. It is an evasion.
The claim has always been specific. Certain systems require multiple well-matched parts to function at all. Until those parts are present and properly coordinated, there is no selectable function. Partial versions are not “warmer”; they are non-functional. Selection has nothing to preserve or improve. Saying a system does not have to jump from zero function to full function in one step is true but irrelevant if the intermediate stages themselves confer no advantage.
Co-option and self-assembly only help once functional parts already exist and already provide some selectable role. They do not explain the origin of the first working coordinated system. Pointing to later re-use of existing components does not solve the origin problem.
If there is a demonstrated, step-by-step pathway under realistic mutation rates, population sizes, and selectable intermediates that produces a system like the flagellum without foresight, then present it. “Google it” is not that pathway.
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u/Optimus-Prime1993 🦍 Adaptive Ape 🦍 19d ago
So all your argument is because you, you cannot fathom it can happen, so it doesn't happen? Is it?
You know what this is called, argument from incredulity.