Page 167 - The Miracle of the Blood and Heart

Blood: The Incomparable
Liquid of Life

processes resemble one another, as well as other proteins not
involved in the process. Therefore, these all must come into
existence as a result of the same gene being copied. This
means that they all must have emerged, allegedly, from a sin-
gle common forerunner. Proteins formed from copies of this
imaginary forerunner were subjected to gradual and minute
alterations until they produced all these similar proteins,
albeit with very different functions.
To this so-called "greatest claim" put forward about the
imaginary evolution of the blood-clotting mechanism,
Michael Behe provides the following reply:
With the proteins of blood clotting, however, the task of adding pro-
teins to the cascade appears to be horrendously problematic. With
one protein acting on the next, which acts on the next, and so forth,
duplicating a given protein doesn’t give you a new step in the cas-
cade. Both copies of the duplicated protein will have the same target
protein which they activate, and will themselves be activated by the
same protein as before. In order to explain how the cascade arose,
therefore, a scientist has to propose a detailed route whereby a dupli-
cated protein turns into a new step in the cascade, with a new tar-
get, and a new activator. Furthermore, because clotting can easily
go awry and cause severe problems when it is uncontrolled, a seri-
ous model for the evolution of blood clotting has to include quanti-
tative factors, such as how much of a clot forms, what pressure it
can resist, how frequent inappropriate clots would be, and many,
many more such questions.
Professor Doolittle has addressed none of these questions. He has
confined his work to the question of what proteins appear to be
descended from what other proteins, and is content to wave
his hands and assert that, well, those systems must have
been put together by natural selection somehow. [...]
Adnan
Oktar

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