Reddit reviews Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

Im not super up to date but...

Hasn’t Darwinian evolution been taking a beating lately?

FWIW: I’m not religious and don’t have a vested interest in Darwinian Evolution being true or false.

The cell has a lot of signatures of design:

https://www.amazon.com/Signature-Cell-Evidence-Intelligent-Design/dp/0061472786

Transitional Fossil problem:

https://www.rae.org/essay-links/faq01/

Genetic memory:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/genetic-memory-how-we-know-things-we-never-learned/

https://www.nature.com/news/fearful-memories-haunt-mouse-descendants-1.14272

Complexity without a reason for it / evolutionary usefulness:

https://fredoneverything.org/darwin-unhinged-the-bugs-in-evolution/

A Thing is Not Possible Merely Because It Happens: The Tarantula Hawk

It is easy to imagine how a complex system, once in existence, can, within limits, evolve under the influence of selective pressures. Any dog breeder can demonstrate this. Or think of the path from Eohippus to Clydesdale. The difficulty lies in knowing how the system came about in the first place.

Consider the Tarantula Hawk, a gigantic wasp that begins life as an egg inside a paralyzed and buried tarantula, where its mother put it. This may seem unmotherly, but there is no accounting for taste. The egg hatches. The larva feeds on the spider, somehow knowing how to avoid the vital organs so as to keep the monster alive and fresh. It pupates and then, a new adult, digs its way out of the burrow.

Off it flies. Never having seen another wasp, or anything else, it finds one, and knows how to mate. (Mating, if you think about it, is a rather more complex process than it may seem to high-schoolers. Some insects mate while flying, which compounds the trickiness. Think airline pilots and stewardesses.) Never having seen a tarantula, it knows how to find one, knows that it needs to attack it, knows exactly how to sting it, knows that it must drag it to its burrow, which it knows it has to dig, knows how to lay its egg on the tarantula and how to bury it.

Now, some of this may be imagined as evolving by gradual steps (emphasis on “imagined,” which in matters evolutionary is good enough) as required by Darwin. All it takes is enough time. In enough time, anything desired will happen. Of millions and billions of eggs deposited in unfortunate tarantulas, over millions of years, some larvae ate the spider’s vital organs and so died in a rotting spider, not passing on their genes. Others pupated but tried to dig out by going downwards or sideways, thus dying and not passing on their genes. Only those with don’t-eat-the-important-parts mutations and this-way-is-up mutations survived, and so their genes became universal. This we are told.

But…but knowing what a tarantula looks like when you have never seen one, or seen anything, knowing that you need to sting it and just how, that you need to dig a burrow and drag the spider to it, and cover it up, when all of this has to occur in order or the whole process fails….

You have to be smoking Drano


Metamorphosis: You Can’t Get There from Here

One of the more evolutionarily preposterous mysteries is metamorphosis in four-cycle insects. Some bug-like critters are two-cycle. For example, a spider´s egg hatches into a tiny spider which grows into a big one. Many, such as butterflies, are four-cycle: egg, larva, pupa, adult.

A butterfly´s egg hatches into a caterpillar, which has no resemblance at all to a butterfly. In physics, butterflies and caterpillars would be anti-particles. This soft, legless, wingless gelatinous tube then pupates and, through a fantastically complex series of physical rearrangements, turns into a fantastically complex butterfly (look at butterflies in detail: they are fantastically complex). Unless something we don´t understand is going on, the likelihood of this happening at all is essentially zero.

The probability of its evolving seems less. How do you get by gradual steps from arthropods that do not have four-cycle lives to those that do? I cannot come up with even the vague plausibility required by Darwinism. Did a pre-existing arthropod shed its exoskeleton, lose its jointed legs, merge head, thorax, and abdomen to become a caterpillar? What selective pressures would cause this? But if it did do this, would not the result be a free-standing species of caterpillar? How do you get by gradual steps from caterpillar to pupating into a butterfly? Pupation is phenomenally complex. You either get all of it right the first time, or you don´t get another chance.

You can believe it if you want

I recommend “Signature in the Cell” by Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D

It’s a long read, but it’s very well researched, and very much worth it.

Very interesting as well. https://www.amazon.com/Signature-Cell-Evidence-Intelligent-Design/dp/0061472786

Don’t let “Intelligent design” fool you; it’s a very scientific book.