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A Brief Discussion About The Mathematical Absurdity of Evolution

Fragility and Irreducible Complexity

Beneficial mutations cannot cause complex subsystems to form in a single step, so you—as an evolutionist—would have to accept the idea that small parts of these subsystems would form first and then mutate into further complex-subsystems.

Two problems with this idea are:

(1) The small non-complex mutations that are becoming part of a complex system would certainly be harmful, useless mutations and would be selected out long before they ever had a chance to develop more complexity.

(2) Math. (see below)

If it takes 1,000,000 harmful mutations to form a part of what will become a complex subsystem later (and for some strange reason it is not selected out), we now have a situation where there is a much stricter requirement about what type of mutation will be "beneficial".

Why?

Because the first "part" of the "developing" complex machine has a much smaller range of attributes (or "designs") that would constitute a "beneficial" mutation to itself. For this reason, we can no longer say that it will only take 1,000,000 (a very conservative number to begin with) mutations to come up with a beneficial mutation. Now that we have the first "part" of the coming complex subsystem, it may take 1,000,000 times 1,000,000 mutations to come up with the second "part" of the machine.

Thats 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000.

Now, lets say that the second "part" of the complex machine did form. Now there is a much narrower range of mutations that could be considered "beneficial" for the next part of the subsystem to form. Furthermore, the likelihood that the current state of the mutation is beneficial (with these two parts hanging off) is far lower than it is when it contains only the first original "part".

So, now let's say that this DID occur for the sake of argument. The third part that needs to be created has to be within a much narrower specification in order to be considered "beneficial", so in this case, it's likely that the number of mutations necessary to form a "part" of the developing system would be (VERY VERY CONSERVATIVELY) 1,000,000 times more specified.

So now, we are dealing with a chance factor that looks like this:

1,000,000,000,000 x 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

And now that we have these three mutations hanging off this organism, what are the chances that it is even remotely beneficial in its current state.

Think about this for a second. Can you design a machine with even 100 parts that is fully functional with only 1 part, and then with only 2 parts, and then with only 3 parts, all the way up to 100?

OK, so now let's get to the fourth part, then the fifth, sixth, all the way to the one-hundredth part.

Do you know how narrow the specifications for the last part would be?

and as a result...

Do you know what kind of numbers we would have as a chance-factor for even the fourth and fifth part developing, not to mention the fiftieth or sixtieth?

Furthermore...

What about a subsystem with 1,000 parts, or 10,000 parts?

The unlikelihood of just the right kind of mutation to complete the subsystem increases multiplicatively (or much more likely factorially) as each new part is added along the way. (My estimates in this post have been conservative to give evolution a broad edge.)

We also need to remember to consider this all-important question:

What are the chances that the unfinished subsystem would be considered "beneficial" and would not be selected out throughout every single step along the course of the construction of this subsystem?

You see, when you look carefully at evolution, it becomes exactly what I've called it all along:

Positively ridiculous.