Bacterium Flagellum molecular machine
Do you believe that complex machines can come about by random processes without a designer? I don’t know anyone who believes the engine under the hood of their car, or the outboard motor on a boat, came about without designers or engineer, i.e. without people intending to design an engine and then using their knowledge and intelligence to bring the ideas in their minds to fruition by putting on paper (or computer) their ideas, and then using those ideas to mold and shape the actual parts, then using an intelligent process to put those parts together.
As I noted in my article titled 15 Reasons Why Evolution has Never Happened, Part 3 I pointed out that:
The famous evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane predicted that we would find no wheels or magnets in living creatures. This is because these would not work unless fully formed. Thus natural selection could not have produced them step by small step, each an improvement over the previous one. Such motors thus falsify evolution by Haldane’s own words.
Because random changes don’t move in a planned direction, an improvement cannot be “selected” and thus retained unless the change itself confers some benefit. If there is no benefit, there can be no selection. A quarter or a half of a wheel confers no benefit, so it cannot evolve. So only an entire wheel can be designed.
If you cannot even get the evolutionary process to create the component parts of an engine or motor, clearly you cannot get evolution to create a complete engine or motor, since it doesn’t have the component parts it needs to build them. It can’t create them either. How, then, does one explain these clearly complex—irreducibly complex—molecular machines in living creatures? Irreducibly complex objects are function-oriented objects with multiple components that do a specific function when all the components are present and correctly assembled. If any component is missing, the specified function ceases to operate and the item can no longer perform that specified function. The classic example, presented by Michael Behe, the popularizer of the concept in his book “Darwin’s Black Box“, is the mousetrap.[1] The root of the idea is in Haldane’s statement regarding a wheel, since he recognizes that a wheel will not work unless it is a complete wheel. A 1/8 or 1/4 wheel will not work. Even Darwin himself recognized the idea, confessing in his “Origin of Species” that:
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
Charles Darwin – Origin of Species
So Darwin recognizes the concept of “irreducible complexity”, even though it wasn’t known by that term in his day. Given that irreducible complexity is a well-recognized concept that disproves evolution when encountered, one must wonder why evolutionists still bother to claim Darwinian evolution works when we have discovered the likes of the following in living creatures, as described in the following posts:
DNA Molecular Copy Machines
Archive
Kinesin
Archive
The ATP Synthase Enzyme
Archive CMI
And of course, the one that Behe himself popularized,
The Bacterial Flagellum Motor
Archive Another View
For this Question Evolution Day, I have a single question. The above are clearly irreducibly complex molecular machines. They are found in living creatures. They cannot be built by the slow and steady processes required by evolution. They cannot be built by any evolutionary process. How then did they come to exist?
They either exist with all components and parts correctly assembled and working (and cannot be done by a designer or engineer if you’re claiming evolution) or start from scratch and you have nothing, since evolution can’t build it. If you remove a part, it is a non-functional item, and, since these are all critically important, the creature could not exist without them. So, again, how did these come to be since evolution cannot “select” to either create the component parts or assemble them together into a working unit? Suggested solutions to this death strike to Darwinian evolution are welcome in the comments below.
Duane Caldwell | February 12, 2026 | Printer friendly version
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Notes
1. Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, New York: Freepress, 1996, p. 43
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Amazing how evolutionists trick themselves into thinking these can form by chance and time. We put a lot of thought and validation into design anything remotely similar.