I wrote this on Richard Dawkin’s website and I was corrected. Apparently in the early 20th century there was a theory which described evolutionary developments that appeared to be irreducibly complex: where missing any one component would make the development a hindrance to survival and procreation. The theory posited that there was a “bridge” component that was selected against once the rest of the components were in place… That’s my apprehension of the theory anyway. However along with “macro” and “microevolution”, the terms have been largely coopted by creationist groups for their own purposes and one is unlikely to get a fair description of their history there.
It’s surprising how much comes up in “The Origin of Species” itself, which I am reading now. The fact that Darwin collected such a staggering amount of evidence before publishing means that the levels of detail he goes into already presaged most claims. For example, he gives a good introduction to rudimentary forms of the eye, the lack of “transitional” fossils, “organs of extreme perfection”, sterile members of a species, wings and the best definition for a species. It’s very handy when combined with modern information/schemas and reading it helps to combat quote mining.
Bah, missed the edit window. According to this here poll, quite a few Americans believe that Creationism should be taught (at least taught about) in schools. I’m not going to assume any causal relationship between creationism and theism, there could certainly be atheists that believe in creationism. However, I’d say that theists hold that occurences in our mortal realm that are inexplicable using natural arguments would attribute said occurences to the supernatural, so it’s worth pointing out the continual progress of naturalism.
Explain what exactly is random in the universe? Nuclear static noise?
Brownian motion? Both seem to be results of a large number of predicted processes.
The human brain is complex, sure, and not well understood but it is glaringly obvious that it is nothing more than a bunch of carbon/hydrogen/etc assembling and creating various complicated mass.
Meh, no two cows are exactly alike but we can study them just fine. The only things that make the brain inscrutable is that it’s very complex and difficult to observe in a running state. Neither of these are fundamental problems.