Of Baramins and Baloney 21

Mark,
I will try again, and keep it within biology.
The surest advancement of science is the null hypothesis. Since nothing can be proven absolutely in the philosophy of science, the strongest evidence is to fail in the sincerest effort to disprove a theory; that is to propose and test an hypothesis that, if it tests positive, would contradict the theory that it tests. I admire Charles Darwin as a scientist, for more reasons than one, but on this point in particular he was right on: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organism exists, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” It’s in Chapter 6, first sentence under the section “Modes of Transition,” page171, in my copy of Origin of the Species.
We need only one hypothesis where the sequence from inorganic to “complex organism” is not reasonable by slight modification from one viable, sustainable generation to the next for intelligent design to be the more plausible explanation. I offer one: Life and food are reciprocally interdependent, and therefore could not have originated sequentially.
The most fundamental requirement for evolution is reproduction. All organisms reproduce or life ends.
To reproduce, all organisms need energy.
No organism receives energy from its environment and redirects it directly into its own application; therefore, as we observe, all organisms require a food source for their energy. To my knowledge we have discovered three energy sources for the synthesis of food within organisms, but we have found no organisms that either utilize energy directly from an inorganic source or burn a non-synthesized food to generate their energy.
This leads to the conclusion that all forms of food are synthesized by organisms. Organisms either produce the food within themselves for their own consumption (for example plants), or their food originates from an organism that is a food-producer. (They eat a food-producer, eat some organism that eats a food producer, eat a byproduct of a food-producer, or eat the byproduct of an organism that eats a food-producer.)
This leads to the conclusion that the very first organism must have been capable of producing food, or it would not have survived to reproduce.
This leads to the conclusion that the very first organism must have been capable of collecting energy from some inorganic source, for example the sun, and using it to combine, for example through photosynthesis, carbon-dioxide and water to produce glucose or some other form of sugar, which is the simplest kind of food. Again, the first organism had to be capable of causing within its own walls something like 6CO2+6H2O=>6O2+C6H12O6 to occur prior to its first reproduction. Otherwise there would have been no energy for any life functions, much less reproduction.
There is no sequence of events, even theoretically conceivable, that could generate, accumulate, and arrange enough of the right molecules to account for the genesis of a walled environment within which the synthesis of sugar would be precipitated, contained, and specifically directed toward any function prior to the reproduction process required for the slight modifications of evolution to even begin. This is not a matter of “we haven’t discovered enough.” It isn’t even theoretically conceivable.
This is not a challenge to Darwin’s theory. I took his endorsement of the null hypothesis and challenged the environment of randomness, but because the breakdown I isolated occurs before reproduction, Darwin’s theory is neither challenged nor supported; it is irrelevant. This is not true for design theory.
Don Mc

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