AP challenges:
Guys, I am currently re-reading Behe's 'Darwin's Black Box' and one of his examples stuck on my mind. In page 44 he asked whether we can evolve bicycles into motorcycles by using only random variations and natural selection. He allows for a factory and a blueprint to simulate bicycle reproduction and blueprint (which can be mutated). However, Behe said the motorcycle is an irreducibly complex system and the bicycle cannot be a functional precursor to a motorcycle.
So I challenge my friends evo and cre: If I start with a factory that produces bicycles from a mutable blueprint, what evolutionary steps would be needed to achieve the final product of a motorcycle?
AP, you and Behe have things a little confused here. The bike doesn't move by itself. It requires a human rider to mobilize it. Therefore, the correct analogy is for the human rider to evolve into the motorcycle engine. You may question whether the evolutionary process can result in a human evolving into a mindless piece of machinery, but you need only pay a visit to Bob Jones University to observe this process in operation.
Actually, the motorcycle did evolve from the bike, but not through a gradual series of allelic gene mutations. It was an instance of endosymbiosis. If you are not familiar with this term, you should read Lynn Margulis' "Symbiotic Planet". It is a very short book and lays out the concept and evidence for endosymbiosis in a straightforward manner. Just be careful not to take her seriously when she proposes this mechanism for all speciation events. She has the mind of a great biologist, but the soul of a crackpot creationist, seeing her solution as the only possible one and all criticism as part os a great conspiracy.
Endosymbiosis was the process whereby modern plants first aquired green chloroplasts for photosysnthesis when one of their ancient ancestors ate a small blue-green algae, and instead of digesting it, started a beautiful relationship.. It is also the process whereby we 'better than thou' eukaryotes acquired our mitochondria when one of our ancestors ate without digesting an efficient aerobic bacterium.
But getting back to bikes and motorcycles: when this red herring analogy was put forth by the blue nosed Behe in his yellow journalism tract he (being a professor of biology) knew full well that it was a total non-sequitor designed to distract the uninformed, which it did in your case. While mankind's (peoplekind's, he/shekind's?) technological evolution certainly has a large Darwinian aspect to it with a lot of small, random modifications filtered through an environmental selection process, it tends to be dominated by Lamarkian processes that make analogies drawn between technological and biological evolution more confusing than enlightening.
Regards, AnInGe