The Missing Tweaks

January 24, 2011 by Dr. Mc.

Today one of my students called, because he couldn’t get past one the steps in a software case I’ve written for them. It has an Excel basis, and when students enter inconsistent data or skip steps, red messages appear in an effort to set them straight. This student could not figure out how to follow the message. After explaining the easy solution to his dilemma, I made a note to myself to tweak the software to make the message clearer. I can fix it with an additional “if-this” statement. (=IF(and(A1>0,SUM(B1)<1),..) But even though I’ve used this basic software with thousands of students, creative students seem always able to find new ways to misunderstand or do it wrong. Fortunately, tweeking is possible for the next class.. and the next..
But it occurs to me that this is not what we find in nature. Sure, organisms change over time with changing environmental conditions, but the programming, as far as we can tell, does not go through “tweaks.” We find organisms that utilize certain alleles to be more successful at surviving to reproduction than others in certain environments; we have even found microorganisms that swop DNA, and evade extinction; but what we don’t find is brand new information in the DNA program. It’s always recycled from somewhere else.
We are even hard pressed to prove that any given organism, or organ, or organelle for that matter, could be improved upon with a few tweaks. Evolution’s classic example bit the dust in 2010, when it was discovered that the human eye really is optimally efficient with its so-called “backward design” of blood vessels and light sensors.
If evolution were actually happening, then science should be replete with examples of organisms with features not-quite-ready-for-prime-time. Evolutionists know this, and constantly list potential candidates for this condition, each of which is toppled over time with discoveries of underlying purpose (another word evolutionists don’t like).

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