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Tuesday 8 March 2016

A Tale of Inequality: Sex, Rape, Alcohol, Anonymity



In the UK there is a two-lane system of law: one for women and one for men. And guess which is the faster, broader, more comfortable lane to travel in.

Last August an unnamed (to protect privacy of those involved, all names are withdrawn here) middle-aged top woman lawyer had a business lunch with a male colleague, a senior City lawyer, suggested by her, followed by a "long boozy afternoon" together.

The pair were then seen outside the very busy Waterloo Station, in London, during rush hour, engaged in indecent and intimate behaviour.

They were arrested and spent the night in a cell in a South London police station.

The following morning, the man denied any wrongdoing and was charged with outraging public decency by engaging in a sexual act during broad daylight. The woman, a QC (Queen's Counsel, namely an especially eminent lawyer) and high-profile barrister, accepted a police caution for the same offence as the man.

Six weeks later the QC changed her story, and said that she should never have accepted the caution because she had, in reality, been the victim of a sexual assault. That claim guaranteed her anonymity for life, while the man, as the defendant, has had his name splashed all over the papers.

Media reports say that six weeks later, after returning to the same police officer who gave her the caution, the woman said she was intending to make an application to have the caution quashed, claiming she was unwell at the time of the incident.

Instead of asking her why she didn’t say all this before accepting the caution, the police officer took her statement and contacted the man, who was told he would be arrested if he didn’t go for a voluntary interview about it.

So, after getting totally drunk and having sex, she claimed she had been sexually assaulted so that, as a "victim", her identity would not be disclosed, her reputation would not be trashed and she would not risk jeopardising her brilliant career. A man cannot have that "opportunity" open to him to protect his name.

We have here another of the many absurdities of the victimhood ideology and culture: women, as pre-labelled "victims", have the privilege of getting plastered and claiming they were raped, men don't. But these women can decide to become unconscious through stratospheric alcohol consumption, and they were conscious when they made that decision. Also: why can't the same thing be said of a man? That a woman sexually assaulted him because he was too drunk to be able to give consent?

Why should a man not be allowed to sue a woman because she had sex with him when he was too drunk to give consent? Reflexes are not a sign of voluntary reaction.

Violence is not claimed to have occurred in these cases of alleged "rape" when the woman was under the influence, because obviously violence was not necessary. So, if there was no resistance, the disparity in physical strength between the sexes - which is anyway general but not universal, true in most cases but not in all - cannot be adduced as an excuse for such unequal treatment of men and women.

To prevent these travesties of justice from happening, the law should be changed so that either both accuser and defendant in sexual crime cases are protected by anonymity or neither is.

Similarly, either both men and women can use being drunk while having sex as grounds for a rape claim or neither can.

Friday 5 February 2016

Lord Bramall Is Innocent, Like So Many Others

Dawkins and Tatchell only Protest Ideological Enemies, not Paedophiles

Tatchell and Dawkins are opposing an ideological enemy, not paedophilia


Lord Bramall, a UK former armed forces chief dubbed a "war hero", has launched a serious attack against London's Metropolitan Police Service (Met for short, aka Scotland Yard) for "failing to speak to witnesses who cast doubt on the claims made 10 months earlier by an alleged abuse victim called Nick".

Almost a year ago the 92-year-old was accused by a single witness, a man in his 40s known as "Nick", who alleged that he had been abused as a boy by a powerful "VIP paedophile ring" (as it came to be called), which included Lord Bramall, former (and late) UK prime minister Ted Heath and the late former Tory MP Harvey Proctor. Among the accusations was that he had raped and tortured young boys in the 1970s.

Bramall was immediately subjected to a heavy-handed police investigation which included a 10-hour raid on his home in Surrey, in the south-east of England. Among other things, Lord Bramall aims to challenge the legality of the search warrant on his property, questioning if the police followed the letter of the law in obtaining the warrant.

The former army chief has always denied the allegations, saying: "I know I have only had sex with someone other than my own sex" and calling any suggestion he was involved in child abuse "absolutely a load of rubbish."

The D-Day veteran criticised a senior police officer named Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald for having appealed for boys who might have been abused to come forward, adding that, if people who had been abused came forward, "we will believe you". Lord Bramall correctly commented that it was not the police's role to accept allegations as true, but the prosecutors' task to prove them.

"We will believe you" seems to me a remark more suitable to a counsellor or psychotherapist than to a policeman. Empathy is required from the former, investigation from the latter. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
The claims against Lord Bramall were part of "Nick"'s allegations, under investigation by the Met, of having been abused by prominent men in the military, politics and law enforcement.

Despite what Det Supt McDonald said, that the police regarded the allegations as "credible and true", Bramall has recently been told that he faces no further action as "following a thorough investigation officers have concluded there is insufficient evidence to charge him with any offence.

Yesterday the ex-director of public prosecutions Lord Kenneth Macdonald (not to be confused with the officer MacDonald quoted above) criticised the new police stance of “we believe the victim”, adding that it could lead to miscarriages of justice and that police had got the balance wrong. He said officers risked being “manipulated by fantasists”.

In an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme he commented: “The worst miscarriages of justice I have seen have resulted from blinkered investigations in which police have believed a theory at the start of the case and gone on to try to prove that theory. We need the police to conduct impartial, objective and professional investigations.”

This is at the end of about a year in which the peer had to live under suspicion of one the most despised crimes. Isn't a man whose reputation has been damaged a victim too? Quite unprecedented, even the Queen expressed her support for the ex army-chief.

The investigating detectives failed their duty when they did not interview key witnesses for 11 months and did not check some of the case's most basic facts for over 5 months.

A lot can be said about this, which is unfortunately similar to many other cases.

But I want to trace it back to where it all started on a big scale: this modern form of persecution dates back to the time when the mostly Left-wing mainstream media had a field day with the so-called "Catholic Church abuse scandal".

Just to see how politically self-serving in order to settle old scores with ideological enemies the furore was, and how absolutely nothing this fake self-righteousness had to do with concern about children, one has to observe the total silence and absence of outrage at the allegations of abuse by politicians and entertainment industry members (or anybody unconnected with the Church) of those professional anti-Christians like Richard Dawkins and Peter Tatchell who so vociferously, venomously and unjustifiably called for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI when he visited Britain in 2010 (see picture above).

For some reason, sexual offences have such a powerful emotional impact that, unlike criminal claims of other nature (like robbery or embezzlement), whenever accusations of sexual misconduct are made there is a presumption of guilt, when in fact there should always be - both legally and morally - a presumption of innocence until proof of guilt is provided.
The onus of the proof is on the accuser.

From the mere claim of an accuser (who may have all kinds of motivations and personal problems) to the evidence of guilt there is a vast distance, similar to that between saying and doing, speculating and demonstrating, fantasy and reality.

The so-called "sex abuse scandal" of the Church has been largely a political campaign by the mainstream media, whose journalists are mostly on the far-Left, anti-clerical and atheists with a vengeance. There were plenty of episodes of false and misleading headlines which were plainly contradicted by the article below, if anyone bothered to read it.

The fact that the Church in many cases chose out-of-court settlements was seen as an admission of guilt instead of, as it should have been seen, as a sign of the Church's desire not to be dragged into a shameful headline war by a hostile media establishment, which thrived on court cases.

Since then, some people have realised that making allegations of sexual abuse (no matter how well or, rather, badly founded) was a way to win money infinitely more reliable than by buying a lottery ticket.

And so the ball of paedophilia or rape charges against men in the public sphere, preferably rich and famous, has kept rolling.

The historic abuse charges are the best because, in the absence of physical evidence after decades, mere acquaintance with a celebrity or politician may be enough to jump on the bandwagon, or even better the gravy train.


By www.CGPGrey.com, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11534384


Wednesday 11 November 2015

The Amorality of Atheism, Great Book

Tatchell's group Outrage calling for the abolition of the age of consent


The Amorality of Atheism (Amazon USA)  (Amazon UK)  by Giorgio Roversi, an Italian author living in Britain, is a slim book that says everything that needs to be said.

Atheism is full of illogicalities both from an ethical and scientific viewpoint.

This book deals with the ethical aspect of atheism's self-contradictions, and it does it brilliantly.

The only consistency of atheist "morality" or rather of atheism in general is with the requirements of a society that simply wants to follow its own wishes and urges without any constraints.

But this is also a society which was founded on Christianity, therefore the remnants of the ethical system that has dominated it for almost two millennia still echo in the hollow chamber of even the most entrenched atheists.

And here is the origin of another contradiction: modern secularists want their cake and eat it. They don't want an external source of their morality so they can forge it the way they like it, but at the same time they want to feel to be self-righteous and doing "the right thing". So they claim that those qualities and acts that we consider good only in virtue of their adherence to the Christian values can find their grounds on something else. But what?

The options offered are all wanting.

Science. One of the most irrational claims of many atheists is that science can guide morality. Hume's principle is here an invincible obstacle: you cannot derive "ought" from "is".

Subjectivity. But that, as Roversi says, is the opposite of morality, which must by its own very nature be universal and therefore objective.

"Nice, good" feelings, like empathy and compassion. But we also have nasty, bad feelings, destructive and harmful to others. If we are only a conglomerate of atoms and cells bent solely towards survival and self-interest, on what rational - not emotional - grounds can we choose which are better between those two competing groups of feelings?

This book should be read by everyone because the subject it deals with concerns all of us in the most fundamental and vital way. A society cannot survive without ethics and, therefore, without God.

The West is trying on itself an experiment that is bound to fail and is already failing, as we can see, for example, from the devastation of the family, the race towards primitivism, the erosion of civilisation and all their consequences, like multiculturalism, destructive immigration and the growing power of Islam.

Giorgio Roversi's The Amorality of Atheism is the antidote to the poisonous misconceptions and deceptions spread by Hollywood, the mass media and the elites (political and intellectual) every minute of every day.

This book is very highly recommended.


Wednesday 30 September 2015

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Thursday 30 July 2015

Innocent Priest Wrongly Accused of Sex Abuse Sues His False Accusers

Father Joseph Jiang between the SNAP bullies Barbara Dorris and David Clohessy


Christians forgive, don't fight back, don't retaliate. In this world, in short, they are easy victims, be it of Isis and other violent Muslims in Asia and Africa or of people who try to milk the Church by way of false accusations in our part of the world.

But at least one priest is pushing back.

Xiu Hui "Joseph" Jiang, a 31-year-old Chinese priest who had faced religious persecution in China for his faith, went to America and experienced something similar, albeit presented in a different way.

Not once but twice the St. Louis priest was falsely accused and cleared. He says that the police officers who arrested him didn't investigate the claims, otherwise they wouldn't have arrested him.

In the first case, involving a girl, Judge Chris Kunza Mennemeyer dismissed the charge of "child endangerment" in November 2013 because Father Jiang had never been alone with the alleged victim, so it was impossible for him to perpetrate the sex abuse of which he had been wildly accused.

In the second case, in April 2014 prosecutors charged Fr. Jiang with two felony counts of first-degree statutory sodomy involving a boy younger than 14.
The archdiocese [of St. Louis] said in a statement issued Friday that the new allegation was reported through the Missouri Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline by a family who over the past year has been pursuing a claim against the archdiocese related to their child being bullied by other students.

“The family had never claimed that their child was abused by a priest until this week,” the statement said. “Fr. Jiang voluntarily surrendered yesterday at the request of police pending a decision whether charges are going to be brought.”
At the time the archdiocese of St. Louis released this statement:
“During the investigation into the veracity of the abuse allegation, Fr. Joseph Jiang agreed to undergo an independent polygraph examination. According to the report released, the examiners concluded that Fr. Jiang responded truthfully in his steadfast denials of sexual abuse of a minor at any point in his life, both during his interview and polygraph examination.”
Last month prosecutors decided to dismiss the charges, quite likely for lack of any evidence to support them.

Now Father Jiang has resolved that enough is enough and, in a first, he has filed a federal lawsuit against his accusers, members of the St. Louis police department for publicly accusing him of being a child molester and two leaders of the group SNAP, who launched a smear campaign against him through the media.

From The Media Report:
In both 2012 and 2014, Rev. Jiang was publicly accused of abuse charges which received wide media attention with SNAP breathlessly claiming that Jiang was a dangerous child molester on the prowl. Yet even at a glance the accusations against Jiang were clearly bogus.

In his lawsuit, Fr. Jiang sets forth a litany of facts which demonstrate just how crazy one accuser's claims were from the start:
◾The accuser's fourth-grade teacher has stated that it was "virtually impossible" that Fr. Jiang pulled the accuser "out of line" at school and abused him as claimed;
◾"The alleged victim had made previous unfounded allegations of sexual abuse";
◾"[The accuser's] fourth-grade teacher indicated that [the accuser] was a serial exaggerator to the point of being 'delusional'";
◾"[The accuser's] parents had a history of making unfounded claims against the Catholic Church for monetary gain";
◾"[The accuser] has never had any personal acquaintance with Fr. Joseph, and he could not identify Fr. Joseph's name when he made the allegation";
◾"[A parent of the accuser once] physically assaulted the principal of [a Catholic school] by choking him or her";
◾"The accusations were brought by a deeply troubled and unreliable 12-year-old boy at the suggestion of his abusive father."
SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) is a controversial association. Reading its material, you find plenty of cases in which a mere accusation, unsupported or not established to be true, against a Catholic priest is treated as an irrefutable proof of guilt. They don't seem to go by the rule "innocent until proven guilty" but on the contrary "guilty until proven innocent (and even after that)".

Based in St Louis, SNAP refers clients to law firms that have pried no less than 2 billion dollars from the US Catholic Church in settlements and judgements between 1992 and 2010, some of which the law firms return to SNAP in donations. A SNAP director had a salary of $90,000 a few years ago.

The two leaders of SNAP who fiercely attacked Father Jiang in the media are Barbara Dorris and David Clohessy. The latter says that he had repressed his memories of abuse at the hands of a priest.

Indeed, many of the claims against Catholic clergy have been based on "repressed and then recovered memories", although the theory behind them is not accepted by the consensus of scientific psychology, despite being the basis of widespread beliefs and practices of lots of "therapists" in a field which is unregulated and where rarely a professional is accountable for his actions and malpractice, unlike other professionals like doctors.

Memory simply doesn't work like that. Memory is not the faithful taperecorder or mirror of events that most of us believe it to be: it's much more "creative" than that.

World expert on memory, Professor Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, for 30 years has been performing experiments showing that any memory can be easily implanted, making people "remember" with certainty something that never happened.

Many lies have been told especially by the media about the Catholic Church mostly invented sex abuse scandal. The "repressed memories syndrome" is one aspect of that false scenario.


Tuesday 28 July 2015

Church Burning and Jewish Settlers in Israel





Published on The Occidental Observer

by Enza Ferreri


Israel’s unfair treatment of Christians continues. At the end of June, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) arrested Greek Orthodox Bishop Atallah Hanna during his peaceful participation in a march protesting the illegal seizure and subsequent sale of Beit al-Baraka hospital, which is part of al-Baraka church, north of Hebron.

A month ago Palestine News Network reported:
A delegation from the Presbyterian church as well as international and Israeli activists participated in the march against the sale of Beit al-Baraka, a hospital which provided medical services to Palestinians as part of al-Baraka church services. The sale is illegal under international and canonical law…

Israeli newspaper Haaretz last month leaked details of the seizure of Beit al-Baraka hospital by a Jewish billionaire, the sale having been allegedly made through a fake Norwegian real estate company. Days after publication of this illegal seizure, the sale process halted, however Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, subsequently decided that there was no legal impediment to the sale of the building.
The previous week saw one of the most serious episodes of violence in recent memory against Christians in Israel.

Five teams of firefighters were necessary to put out the flames which at dawn woke up Tabgha, the area on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, in northern Israel, where Jesus fed the 5,000 with the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Mark 6:30-46) and where Jesus appeared for the fourth time after his resurrection following his Crucifixion (John 21:1-24).

A fire broke out at the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, built on the site of the miracle, in the middle of the night, “causing extensive damage to the inside and outside of the building, said Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.” A monk and a church volunteer were hospitalised from smoke inhalation.

A spokesman for the fire brigade said that the blaze broke out in several places inside the limestone church, evidence that it was started deliberately.

Hebrew graffiti had been spray-painted in red on a wall outside the church, reading "False gods will be destroyed”, a passage from the Aleinu Leshabeach, a prayer recited by practising Jews at the end of each of the three daily services, suggesting that Jewish zealots were responsible.

So much for the much-vaunted "Judaeo-Christian tradition". These Israeli Jews didn't get the memo.

Police briefly detained 16 young Jewish settlers, all religious Jewish seminary students visiting the Sea of Galilee area from settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They were freed within hours. Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that 10 of those detained were from Yitzhar, which is known as a bastion of extremists and where some residents have been involved in previous hate crimes.

The Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish is one of the Holy Land’s most famous Catholic churches and one of the places most visited by pilgrims to the Holy Land, with more than 5,000 people visiting it daily. The church had to be closed for a few days due to the fire damage.

Nahum Weisfish, a Jerusalem rabbi, said the site might have been targeted because it housed a synagogue some 2,000 years ago.

The site is owned by the German Roman Catholic Church, and Berlin's envoy to Israel Andreas Michaelis said he was "shocked" by the incident, adding: "Religious institutions must be as well protected in Israel as they are in Germany and Europe."

That’s exactly the point. If Israel wants to be considered as a Western democracy, it’s no good to argue that Christians in the Jewish state are not butchered and tortured with the degree of barbarity we find in Muslim countries and Muslim-controlled areas. The difference pointed out between Israel and other Middle Eastern nations is true, but the right object of comparison for a country which claims to be part of the West should be Western democracies.

Zionists have to stress how concerned they are about the fate of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of murderous Muslims to keep the Evangelicals supporting their cause. That doesn't stop Israel from secretly helping the worst murderers of Christians: ISIS.

Tabgha had been subjected to a previous attack in April 2014. Father Matthias Karl, a German monk at the church, explained that a group of religious Jewish teenagers had pelted worshippers with stones, destroyed a cross and threw benches into the lake.

In April, vandals smashed gravestones at a Maronite Christian cemetery near Israel's northern border with Lebanon.

In recent years, many mosques and churches have been vandalised in both Israel and the West Bank.

The attacks are often attributed to extremist Jews, particularly from West Bank settlements, but, despite condemnations and promises of crackdown on religiously-inspired hate crime by Israeli politicians, few have been convicted.

The Rabbis for Human Rights group says there have been 43 hate crime attacks on churches, mosques and monasteries in Israel and the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2009.

Many of these are so-called "price-tag" attacks, carried out against Israeli security forces as well as Palestinian property, both Muslim and Christian, in reprisal for Israeli government’s action against the Jewish illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The name indicates that these attacks are the price to pay for anti-settlement activity.

The US State Department's 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism included price-tag attacks for the first time. It says: “In August, the Beit Jamal Monastery near Jerusalem was firebombed and spray-painted with the words “death to the Gentiles” and other slogans.”

It quotes UN figures of “399 attacks by extremist Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian injuries or property damage.” It adds that such attacks were “largely unprosecuted according to UN and NGO sources.”

Whenever there is mention of the UN, Zionists reject wholesale every one of its pronouncements or reports because it is "pro-Palestinian". The implication is that it is biased. They often argue that all Muslim countries, through the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), vote as a bloc in the UN, thus skewing the vote results in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel. OIC is a 57-member state organisation representing 1.5 billion Muslims around the world. As the largest Islamic organization in the world, it is quite powerful and the largest voting bloc in the UN.

Could it be that the UN is "pro-Palestinian" because of the right of return that Israel denies that people or the 3/4 of a million illegal settlers in Israel’s occupied territories?

Israel’s Joint Arab List party alliance, in the wake of the latest attack, that against the Church of the Multiplication, called for the immediate dismissal of Israel's police chief, Yohanan Danino, and for Right-wing extremist groups to be declared terrorist organisations. It also accused the government of doing nothing to control extremist Right-wing organisations:
"Netanyahu stands at the head of the incitement system against the Arab public in Israel, and he is guilty of the revenge attacks we witness in the morning news," the party stated. "A so-called price-tag attack is not an act by deviants, but rather an act by calculated, thinking people that are indicative of the existence and repercussions of institutionalized racism and oppression."
Prime Minister Netanyahu has used strong words against the recent unknown vandals, but it’s impossible not to notice that the perpetrators of this kind of crime have almost never been identified, captured and put on trial. Isn’t it a bit strange, in a country which has an impressive and efficient security and police apparatus?

In 2014, just before Pope Francis’ visit to Israel, in Jerusalem both the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Notre Dame Center, the large Christian complex just outside the Old City, were covered with offensive graffiti. Before that, the Franciscan Church near the Last Supper Room, the Dormition Abbey and a nearby Christian cemetery were attacked. In 2012, using methods similar to those employed in Tabghah, the Latrun Trappist Monastery had been attacked. People tried and sentenced? Nil.

With all the best will in the world, it’s a bit hard to see Netanyahu as someone who doggedly pursues Jewish vandals coming from the settlements. That’s because Netanyahu is and has always been the settlements’ number one supporter. When Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw from Gaza in 2004, Netanyahu left his government in protest. In the last twenty years the surface occupied by Israeli settlements in the occupied territories has grown by over 180%, and for at least half of this time Netanyahu has been Prime Minister.

The last act of the previous Netanyahu government, the one that led to the disintegration of the government and early elections, was its approval of the law that defines Israel as the "state of the Jewish nation", potentially discriminating against ethnic and religious minorities.

In short, all of Netanyahu’s political action has been in favour of the settlements policy. He has drawn a growing political support from it. The reality is that today the settlers are those who dictate the political trend in Israel. Their interests influence the agenda of governments. The intransigence of those who hold the front line, even risking their lives, is to be respected. The rest, including arsons, is just a consequence.


Saturday 25 July 2015

Cell Vesicles Coats and Irreducible Complexity

Click on the graphic to enlarge it


Living cells contain vesicles, sacs that transport water and substances like proteins and lipids among different compartments of the cell, including between the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and the Golgi apparatus, or between the outside and the interior of the cell.

The formation of such trafficking vesicles is among the most fundamental processes taking place in the cell.

A team of scientists of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Heidelberg has produced - using low-temperature cryo-electron tomography - the most detailed pictures ever obtained of the coats surrounding transport vesicles, images that have revealed a thus-far unimagined complexity.

This is the first time that a model of a complete assembled vesicle coat has been realised. The study, published in Science earlier this month, contradicts the current “adaptor-and-cage” view of coated vesicle formation.

The way these highly interconnected coats, made of proteins, function has been compared to a self-driving car which, when you walk out of your front door, assembles around you, rises from the ground, takes you to your destination levitating in the air, then disassembles, ready to pick up another passenger. Something very similar does happen in biological cells.

Progress in science constantly shows that life is much more intricated, sophisticated and complex than we suppose.

There are three types of known transport vesicles, each with its specific type of coat which is composed of different proteins and assembles onto a membrane surrounding the vesicle: Clathrin-coated vesicle (CCV), Coat Protein 1 (COPI), Coat Protein 2 (COPII).

While it was believed that the assembled COPI coat was similar to Clathrin and COPII, it was found instead that it is more complicated, having seven proteins coming together simultaneously and forming complexes with triangular symmetry that allow the complex to attach to the vesicle membrane. The "triads" forming the coat are called "coatomers":
[A]ssembled coatomer can adopt different conformations to interact with different numbers of neighbors. By regulating the relative frequencies of different triad patterns in the COPI coat during assembly -- for example, by stabilizing particular coatomer conformations -- the cell would have a mechanism to adapt vesicle size and shape to cargoes of different sizes.[Emphasis added]
Evolution News website comments:
The complexity of these coats, and the accessory proteins that build them, attach them to vesicles and disassemble them, defy unguided evolutionary explanations. They exhibit irreducible complexity; they don't work unless all the protein parts are present simultaneously.
An irreducibly complex mechanism is such that it cannot work unless all its components are present at the same time.

Many machines exhibit this property. But so do many biological mechanisms and organs.

University of Illinois biologist Tom Frazzetta, in his 1975 classic Complex Adaptations in Evolving Populations (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , wrote:
When modifying the design of a machine, an engineer is not bound by the need to maintain a real continuity between the first machine and the next modification .. But in evolution, transitions from one type to the next presumably involve a greater continuity by means of a vast number of intermediate types. Not only must the end product - the final machine - be feasible, but so must be all the intermediates. The evolutionary problem is, in a real sense, the gradual improvement of a machine while it is running.
Frazzetta, an expert in functional biomechanics (the study of how animals work) had for many years studied and dissected the skulls of the bolyerine snakes, rare snakes of the Island of Mauritius. These animals, similar to boas, have a unique anatomical specialisation: their upper jaw is made up of two segments joined together and requiring many specialised tendons, bones, ligaments, muscles, nerves and other tissues.

This characteristic allows the bolyerine snakes to bend the front half of their divided upper jaw backwards when attacking a prey, resulting in a wider opening of the mouth.

How could this system of interconnected tendons, ligaments, muscles, bones and nerves have evolved gradually, as neo-Darwinism contends? It's an all-or-nothing situation.

No intermediate condition could have worked and consented the viability of this species.

As evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould put it in "The Return of Hopeful Monsters": “How can a jawbone be half broken?”