Michael Behe shows in Darwin’s Black Box that the criterion for failure of Darwin’s theory has been met.
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This is shown through a system that is irreducibly complex, by which he means “a single system composed of well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease to function”.
Thus, such a system could not have evolved slowly, piece by piece. Behe uses the concept of irreducible complexity to support his belief in intelligent design of life forms. This is because of the fact that irreducible complexity is present in the creation of the first single-cell animals, which makes random creation essentially impossible.
Right at the beginning of creation, the single-celled amoeba, whilst appearing to be a simple organism, is, in fact, a marvel of creation so complex that it has all the integral parts for sustaining life and, if any single part was ill-formed or missing, the remaining parts would all be useless and unable to reproduce and, above all, none of the individual parts is capable of replicating or sustaining themselves independently.
Behe points out that none of the top scientists, academies, institutes or universities can give a detailed account of how the “cilium, or vision, or blood clotting, or any complex biological system might have developed in a Darwinian fashion”. So how did they occur? If they were not put together gradually, then they must have been put together quickly or even suddenly.
Behe’s conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed, in fact, planned. By design he means the purposeful arrangement of parts. Behe states: “The designer knew what the systems would look like when they were completed, then took steps to bring the
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systems about. Life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity”.
One can infer design because a number of separate components are ordered to accomplish a purpose that none of the components could do by itself. By intelligent design he meant design that goes beyond the laws of nature.
It is not a distant “jump” to conclude that design of the “cellular black box”, the molecular foundation of life, was likely to be of extraterrestrial origin. Why should people continue to deny the existence of design when Behe’s book makes the case so powerfully? What is so worrying about the possibility of “intelligent design”? This seems to be an area which will be less threatening once the reality of extraterrestrial existence is revealed, and which will ultimately fall within the realm of exopolitics (a field of activity discussed later when reviewing Michael Salla’s Exposing US Government Policies on Extraterrestrial Life.
DNA
Further, DNA is the mechanism enabling reproduction of all forms of life on earth. Graham Hancock sets out in immense detail in Supernatural the fact that the make-up of DNA of is too complex to have materialized by chance. The four-letter DNA ‘language’, together with the 20-letter protein ‘language’ and the translation mechanism that links the two were far more likely to have been engineered or ‘created’, before it arrived on earth. Crick (and the astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle) felt
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it must have been created by intelligent aliens billions of years ago. It seems that for the first 600 million years of earth’s 4.5 billion years of existence it was simply a molten lava fireball, but by 3.9 billion years ago cooling was sufficiently advanced to produce a thin outer crust of solid rock. It is supposed that around the same time pools of water enriched with minerals began to take shape beneath an atmosphere of simple gases.
In this water, primitive life forms appeared suddenly.
Crick felt that it was essentially impossible for instant life to form in this way without assistance. These early life forms contained the DNA that still makes life today.
Over the billions of years that followed, life forms evolved and the messages in the DNA sat there waiting for a sufficiently evolved creature to be able to make use of the information coded in the DNA by intelligent alien entities. If the creator didn’t know what form of creature would ultimately evolve, the only place to hide the secrets of creation would be in the DNA itself, waiting for a sufficiently intelligent creature to unravel the codes.
Crick speculated that DNA was preserved in earth creatures by alien entities to ensure its survival from a catastrophic event elsewhere in the universe. Our DNA is certainly a thing of wonder. DNA is a crystalline substance with a shape that makes it a perfect receiver-transmitter. The membrane of every human cell is a liquid crystal, of which we have trillions in our bodies.
These cells could be called the computer hard drive of the body and the software is the crystalline DNA holding the genetic memory. We have some 120 billion miles of DNA in our bodies and it can store more than a hundred trillion times more information than any device that human science can construct.
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