Irreducible mechanisms - the enemy of evolution?

Darwin said one thing that was right (I am not saying that it was the only thing!) and that was that the presence of irriducible mechanisms would blow Darwinian ideas out of the water.

What Darwin did not know at the time was that there are many such mechanisms in the living creatures on this planet.

Evolution is the 'survival of the fittest'. Those animals that have an advantage over their competitors are able to do better than their competitors, resulting in the success in survival terms over their competitors.
Simply put, those animals who succeed in passing their genetic material to the next generation are the winners in Evolution.

Natural Selection is at work here, those characteristics that do better in the given environment are those that succeed. So they are passed on to the next generation. Those characteristics that are not passed on to the next generation are lost from the genetic pool.
One could imagine that if, say, all the trees and bushes over one foot tall are destroyed, then a giraffe is at a major disadvantage compared to, say, a small deer. A frequently quoted example are the finches that Darwin observed.

In dry weather those birds with tougher, maybe larger beaks would do better than other finches. They could subsequently easily produce healthier and more numerous offspring, thus becoming a dominant characteristic.
It is feasible that, over a few generations, that the birds with the smaller beaks could die out completely and that the genes that produce smaller beaks are lost from the gene pool altogether.

It would seem obvious therefore that any mutation or characteristic that served no purpose, or was even a handicap of some sort,would be rapidly removed from the gene pool.

A functioning eye needs an optic nerve to take the signals to the brain and the control systems in the brain to interpret the signals to allow conscience desicions to be made.
Even a minimalist version of these features could not possibly be created by chance. The idea that random chance could produce three distinctly seperate mechanisms all designed to work together, all at the same time, is beyond any rational belief.

Yet 'natural selection' is a key concept in evolutionary thought. An eye without the optic nerve would be totally useless and natural selection would remove it; the components of vision could not occur separately over time!

And why do most creatures with vision have two eyes? Our genetic programming in the DNA produces a symmetry with the left side of the body matching the right side of the body. Random chance would not operate that way.

An irriducible mechanism, such as vision, is one that has multiple components (in this case eyeballs, optic nerves and brain control systems) all of which must be fully functioning from day one to give the creature an advantage.

There are many such mechanisms in the natural world. That is why Darwin recognised that his theories could be assigned to the dustbin if any irriducible mechanisms were found to exist!

Order infers design. Disorder is associated with randomness.