Irreducible Complexity and Flagella - Deconstructing ID

Part 2 of a 7-part series with Dr. Eugenie C. Scott.: Debunking Intelligent Design.
Dr. Scott criticizes claims by creationists that flagellated bacteria (flagellum) are an example of irreducible complexity. She concludes that examples of irreducible complexity by proponents of creation science are empirically wrong.
Recorded at the 'Biology of Genomes' meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, June 1, 2009.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• flagellum
• flagella
• irreducible complexity
• creationism
• creation science
• intelligent design
• religion
• science

[zytigon]

Flagellum is catch 22 for Christianity. If you say it had to be designed then you say God deliberately created the bacteria which cause so much misery & suffering, also God never told anyone the cure, Jesus never either, in fact he said don't bother washing hands before eating (Mark7). If you say well flagellum could evolve after the fall, then everything else could evolve since it is very complex so the Bible is proven false. There could be a good god who takes everyone to heaven.

[crabbieappleton]

Simply put, ID is intellectual laziness, like the college freshman not finding information on Wikipedia and thus deciding that it doesn't exist.

[tubewatch59]

Instead, ID uses the tools of science to investigate how likely it is that irreducibly complex (true by definition) systems really could have originated naturally.

Instead of considering that approach, which may lead to some pretty profound implications about the origin of life, IC systems, etc, she's simply trying to define any explanation that isn't compatible with naturalism (like ID) as being non-science.

That's silly. It's also a sign of someone who's afraid of the competition.

[tubewatch59]

"Take off the table for science to explain?"

She's making a pretty basic error in reasoning. No one is trying to shutdown research into a naturalistic origin of irreducibly complex systems. In fact we're daring you guys to do it. That should give you plenty of motivation right there.

Science isn't naturalism. Naturalism is just one philosophy of science. Naturalism assumes that ALL of the natural world originated via mindless natural processes. But we don't know that's true.

[KnightofMotley]

@ronocko I'm not incapable of accepting the rare occurence; I just don't buy it. We can disagree. :)

[KnightofMotley]

@ronocko Re: "anti-life", I think the odds of life on a planet are a thousandth of a trillionth, if I remember correctly; that's based upon a very generous postulation over 20 concurrent requirements.

On the other hand, the Bible talks about angelic beings in the heavens & those being cast out living in the 2nd heaven, so alien life technically is spoken of in Scripture. Puts a new spin on ET, no?

[KnightofMotley]

@ronocko I don't need to prove a transcendent mind in order to postulate one; I can't prove love, but I believe it is concrete reality. The laboratory is not equipped to judge the whole of our reality experience; we need to think beyond test tubes into the rest of reality; where did those parts come from? Some postulate love & hate as merely chemical reactions; these are petty arguments that no one accepts in their own behavior. We need to look @ the whole of our reality, not just molecules.

[KnightofMotley]

@ronocko According to mathematician Marco Schutzenberger, "A theory of evolution that depends on uniformly randomly occurring mutations cannot be the truth because the number of mutations needed to create the speciation that we observe, and the time that would be needed for those mutations to have happened by chance, exceed by thousands of orders of magnitude the time that has been available." That's not a royal flush; that's w/ billions of years being insufficient.

[KnightofMotley]

@ronocko You believe the sun came 1st, then the planets. The Bible says the other way around. Of course, when these things were being made, space & time were also being made, so the universe before this wouldn't have existed; things'd be radically different.

We approximate the size of our galaxy, plus how fast it's moving. We know the general shape of our galaxy. If you do the math, and the universe were billions of years old, we'd have long since lost the spiral shape.

[KnightofMotley]

@ronocko The four corners of the earth idiomatically refers to the four points of the compass, though some have claimed that the earth is actually not a sphere but a tetrahedron (I've no idea on that!). 4 corners doesn't mean flat earth anymore than the long arm of the law means the law has appendages. The dispersion did actually cover all 4 points, so right again. The heavenly luminaries (stars, moon, sun) actually do mark the seasons, give light & direction, so how is that false?