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Claim CB940:

Complex structures could not have arisen by chance.




  1. Evolutionists the world over are, and always have been, unanimous in their agreement that complex structures did not arise by chance. The theory of evolution does not say they did, and to say otherwise is to display a profound absence of understanding of evolution. The novel aspect that Darwin proposed is natural selection. Selection is the very opposite of chance.

    Selection of randomly introduced variation is known to be able to produce complex formations, including functional circuits (Davidson 1997; Thompson 1996) and robots (Lipson and Pollack 2000). Creationists have never proposed a reason to explain why the same processes would not produce the same results in nature.

  2. The principles by which evolution works, including random variation and recombination and natural selection, have proven successful and useful for designing new drugs (Coghlan 1998), for designing better enzymes for detergents (Pollack 2000), and, as genetic algorithms, for many other applications.


  1. Coghlan, Andy, 1998. A sexual revolution. New Scientist 160 (21 Nov.): 4. See also: Maxygen, 1998. When genes "breed" in the lab, a surprising number of their offspring are supergenes. (Press release, 18 Nov. 1998)
  2. Davidson, Clive, 1997. Creatures from primordial silicon. New Scientist 156 (15 Nov.): 30-34.
  3. Lipson, Hod and Jordan B. Pollack, 2000. Automatic design and manufacture of robotic lifeforms. Nature 406: 974-978.
  4. Pollack, Andrew, 2000. Selling evolution in ways Darwin never imagined. New York Times, 28 Oct. 2000, business section.
  5. Thompson, Adrian, 1996. An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics.

Further Reading:



Dawkins, Richard, 1986. The Blind Watchmaker: why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. New York: Norton.

created 2001-2-17