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Thomas's avatar

James

Respect due to you for accepting my criticism of your argumentation against evolution by cherry picking Bill Bryson's book. Maybe I was a bit harsh is questioning your motives but using one quote to support your point but missing out another quote from the same source that refutes your point does seem questionable at the very least. From your edit it is now clear that you are arguing from the creationist's intelligent design theory by writing " For me, billions of years don’t solve the problem of irreducible complexity"

This takes me back years when I was looking into this but for those of your followers the issue of Irreducible Complexity is explained by the example of the bacterial flagellum - the appendage like structure which allows the bacterium to 'swim'.

It is a highly complex molecular machine protruding from many bacteria as long spiral propellers attached to motors that drive their rotation. The only way the flagellum could have arisen, some claim, is by design.

Each flagellum is made of around 40 different protein components. The proponents of an offshoot of creationism known as intelligent design argue that a flagellum is useless without every single one of these components, so such a structure could not have emerged gradually via mutation and selection. It must have been created instead.

In reality, the term “the bacterial flagellum” is misleading. While much remains to be discovered, we now know there are thousands of different flagella in bacteria, which vary considerably in form and even function.

The best studied flagellum, of the E. coli bacterium, contains around 40 different kinds of proteins. Only 23 of these proteins, however, are common to all the other bacterial flagella studied so far. Either a “designer” created thousands of variants on the flagellum or, contrary to creationist claims, it is possible to make considerable changes to the machinery without mucking it up.

What’s more, of these 23 proteins, it turns out that just two are unique to flagella. The others all closely resemble proteins that carry out other functions in the cell. This means that the vast majority of the components needed to make a flagellum might already have been present in bacteria before this structure appeared.

Without a time machine it may never be possible to prove that this is how the flagellum evolved. However, what has been discovered so far – that flagella vary greatly and that at least some of the components and proteins of which they are made can carry out other useful functions in the cells – show that they are not “irreducibly complex”.

More generally, the fact that today’s biologists cannot provide a definitive account of how every single structure or organism evolved proves nothing about design versus evolution. Biology is still in its infancy, and even when our understanding of life and its history is far more complete, our ability to reconstruct what happened billions of years ago will still be limited.

Think of a stone archway: hundreds of years after the event, how do you prove how it was built? It might not be possible to prove that the builders used wooden scaffolding to support the arch when it was built, but this does not mean they levitated the stone blocks into place. In such cases Orgel’s Second Rule should be kept in mind: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13663-evolution-myths-the-bacterial-flagellum-is-irreducibly-complex/#ixzz6t4NzIC7E

Will be interesting to read your take on Irreducible Complexity

Hugh

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Thomas's avatar

Come on you supporters of James. Refute my criticism. Or maybe you don't care!

Hugh

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