Darwin offered strong, if grudging, praise and took Mivart far more seriously than any other critic…Mivart gathered, and illustrated with admirable art and force” (Darwin’s words), all objections to the theory of natural selection — “a formidable array” (Darwin’s words again). Yet one particular theme, urged with special attention by Mivart, stood out
as the centerpiece of his criticism. It remains today the primary stumbling block among thoughtful and friendly scrutinizers of Darwinism. No other criticism seems so troubling, so obviously and evidently “right” (against a Darwinian claim that seems intuitively paradoxical and improbable). Mivart awarded this criticism a separate
chapter in his book, right after the introduction. He also gave it a name, remembered ever since. He called it “The Incompetency of ‘Natural Selection’ to account for the Incipient Stages of Useful Structures.” If this phrase sounds like a mouthful, consider the easy translation: we can readily understand how complex and full developed structures
work and owe their maintenance and preservation to natural selection — a wing, an eye, the resemblance of a bittern to a branch or of an insect to a stick or dead leaf. But how do you get from nothing to such an elaborate something if evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each favored by natural selection? You
can’t fly with 2% of a wing or gain much protection from an iota’s similarity with a potentially concealing piece of vegetation. How, in other words, can natural selection explain these incipient stages of structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more elaborated form?”

These fallacies occur because the author mistakenly assumes that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. However, things joined together may have different properties as a whole than any of them do separately.

The term non sequitur literally means “it does not follow”. In this section we describe fallacies which occur as a consequence of invalid arguments.-

The problems include limited access to mass media outlets afforded to some voices in our political process; “sound bite” journalism that covers campaign strategy more than policy pronouncements and emphasizes conflict over consensus; and overreliance on the medium of television, the logic of which makes politics “an activity of style over substance, image over reality, melodrama over analysis, belief over knowing, awareness over understanding.” The primary cause of these problems, [Robert] Denton argues, lies in “contemporary news values.” As a business, the media must maintain high circulation (or ratings) in order to make a profit by selling advertising. The incentive to make the news entertaining is overwhelming. But information that is most useful in a democratic system may often be subtle and complex — boring, to some.

But politics cannot begin to put the conecting tissue back in society. It is ill-equipped to reconstruct traditional moral beliefs. The best policies cannot recover courtship or marriage, make fathers responsible for their children, restore shock or shame where it once existed, or recover legitimate social authority to institutions that have been hollowed out by a pervasive ideology of individual autonomy. The vast majority of moral problems that trouble us cannot be eradicated by law.

In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution,geological succession, and such other facts, might come to the
conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but
had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a
conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it
could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have
been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and
coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that
people often say about Him: "I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral
teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing
we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things
Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a
lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or
else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either
this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something
worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him
as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But
let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great
human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Riposte

See Stephen T. Davis, "Was Jesus Mad, Bad, of God" in The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (Oxford University Press: 2004), pp 221-45.