Wednesday 10 November 2010

Run rabbit, run, run, run

Photoshop gives the evolutionary edge to anything!
I once watched a stoat hunt down and kill a rabbit - just the kind of 'selective pressure' that should (according to Darwinian principles) cause the emergence of a tribe of super-rabbits that could outrun stoats. No problem with that. But natural selection is never going to endow cabbages with a turn of speed sufficient to outrun their rabbit  predators, because cabbages can't move in the first place.
Natural selection can only work by preserving or 'selecting' fortuitous improvements in some functional aspect of the organism.  
...complex biological systems cannot evolve step-by-step as taught by new-Darwinianism, because until they have become functioning systems they serve no purpose and natural selection cannot operate upon them. In asking how a irreducible complex system could arise, we're not asking how rapid-rabbits might evolve from also-rans but how a cabbage might grow legs.
 p75-76 Who Made God? Searching For a Theory of Everything

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