Page 114 - The Origin of Birds and Flight

112 The Origin of Birds and Flight

THE IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY IN WINGS
One obvious distinguishing feature between birds and reptiles is
that birds have wings. As you saw in the preceding chapter, the feathers
comprising the wing constitute a field of research all of their own, and
their complex creation amazes scientists. However, for a bird to be able
to fly, it is not enough for it to have feathers. Those feathers need to be
distributed in a specific sequence equally on both wings. If you set out a
bird’s feathers at random—and the feathers are denser on one side, for
example—then an imbalance will arise, and the bird will be unable to fly.
In addition, the facts that wings can be opened and closed, that both are
symmetrical, that their structure permits flight techniques, all show that
they have been specially created for flight.
Although scientists use birds as models to imitate, they can never
manage to produce wings as successful as birds’. Considering that hu-
mans, possessed of reason and technology, cannot imitate the wing that
birds possess from the moment they are hatched, you can better see how
these animals’ ability to fly is a miracle of Allah.
How did such complex structures as the eye, lung, wings and the
cell develop in stages? This question is one of the greatest dilemmas fac-
ing evolutionists. These structures consist of interrelated components,
none of which serve any purpose in the absence of any other. They can-
not have formed gradually, as evolutionists claim, because the absence
of any one component will make the organ functionless. Scientific liter-
ature refer to this as irreducible complexity. Since a half-developed wing
will be of no benefit to an organism, then according to evolution’s own
claims, that useless organ will become vestigial and gradually disappear.
This presents an insoluble problem for the theory of evolution. The
atheist evolutionist Richard Dawkins effectively admits as much:
Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it
must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming into exis-
tence of complicated, apparently designed objects, like eyes. For if it is
not gradual in these cases, it ceases to have any explanatory power at