First let me say Cadet that I do appreciate you presenting evidence for one molecular system and showing scientific explanation rather than making clear assertions and ad hominem attacks or mocking in response to my posts. Thank you.
The video begins by misrepresenting what ID is all about which is never good, making strawman positions so you can shoot them down easily.
Not really. The argument has "evolved", but at the time it pretty much was as simple as "The flagellum could not possibly have evolved, therefore it required an intelligent designer". Which was proven completely wrong. That wasn't the full extent of ID, obviously, but it was the full extent of its discussion of the flagellum to my knowledge.
There is no reason for claiming these ancestral proteins and systems explain how something else evolved when those have not been explained themselves.
Do we know the mass of Pluto? No. Do we have to know that to reasonably conclude that Newton's laws of gravitation apply to it the same way they do to everything else? No. Would we be justified in claiming that it is just as reasonable to believe that Pluto's mass is the same as a cement cinder block, and that G is just somehow stronger for it? No. Would we be justified in claiming that it's just as reasonable to believe that Pluto's mass is the same as a cement cinder block, and that some as of yet unknown supernatural entity is constantly correcting its orbit? I'll leave this one up to the reader as an exercise.
Look, in nature, what we see is, from top to bottom, systems that only make sense in the light of evolution. We see a pattern of genetic, morphological, and embryological descent all forming a coherent, cohesive nested hierarchy (
It only pushes back the need to explain them and how they arose. It also makes assumptions about common ancestral elements when the only reason for doing so is that scientists who discovered the similarity between the export apparatus and F1-F0 ATP synthase speculated that the two motors must share a common evolutionary origin. The sole basis for this speculation is the structural and mechanistic similarity of the motors.
Actually, it's that they're structurally the same proteins, produced by the same genes. This is a sure-fire sign of descent with modification - the modification of existing proteins used elsewhere in the organism. There's not a step here that could not be accomplished via evolution, and that is the point.
If not for this similarity, there would be no reason to think that the export apparatus and the F1-F0 ATP synthase evolved from a common ancestral protein complex. We know from human design that designers use the same type of structures and mechanisms in different designs.
You
really need to go read my latest thread on how we detect design, and maybe read some Dawkins.
It is interesting that you said that considering that a new branch in Science is doing just that. scientists in this new area of Systems Biology exploring systems by reverse engineering. Rather than looking at life systems from the bottom-up they are now looking at them from top down and being very successful. Engineering itself implies design and reverse engineering reinforces the design significance in life forms.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Biological Systems is trying to do. Yeah, there's engineering involved - they're trying to manipulate the organisms to produce specific results! This does not somehow go on to demonstrate that all previous changes, or even all changes of a similar nature were engineered! I wonder - how many of the people writing these paper deny common descent? I can tell you right now that this guy doesn't:
Systems Biology: The Role of Engineering in the Reverse Engineering of Biological Signaling
Pablo A. Iglesias
Here's another paper by Iglesias:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25346418
These people don't reject common descent or descent with modification. They, like members of every other field of biology, use it as a model and a tool on a constant basis.
You are making the claim that ID can't be falsified but you are pointing out in doing so that evolution can't be. If we can hypothesize any ol' pathway that "could have happened" evolution can be said to be able to do anything.
And now, a short list of falsification criteria for evolution:
- a complex biological system for which no useful intermediate or homologous genetic structure can be found
- A creature showing atavisms that were not useful for any previous ancestor, for example a fish with unused mammary glands.
- Fossil bunnies in the Cambrian
- A crocoduck
- A pegasus
- A tit with [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]
- A lack of convergence between genotype and phenotype
And so on, and so forth. There are a
lot of situations that could falsify the theory! It makes a lot of predictions, and like any theory that makes predictions, if those predictions turn out wrong, it shows the theory to be wrong in some aspect.
You admit that the BF is put together in such a way as to resemble human invention.
I honestly don't care if I thought it was, it does nothing to further the argument of design, as we do not determine design simply by
looking at it. For what it's worth, human inventions do not typically use proteins homologous to the structure to design microscopic machines. They also typically don't very nicely into a nested hierarchy.
You claim that intelligence was not necessary for the BF without providing evidence that evolution alone could produce it
That is the
entire purpose of that model - showing how, through intermediate steps and random mutations, this could have happened. That's the model is there for. Its sheer existence shows that the bacterial flagellum could have evolved. No step requires anything natural processes couldn't craft. Whether the model is
correct is another question entirely, but one that doesn't matter for the sake of this argument. What the model does is ground the discussion firmly in the natural, making it clear that there was no need to invoke the supernatural.
what? I don't see Dawkins quote.
The world is divided into things that look as though somebody designed them (wings and wagon-wheels, hearts and televisions), and things that just happened through the unintended workings of physics (mountains and rivers, sand dunes, and solar systems). Mount Rushmore belonged firmly in the second category until the sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved it into the first. Charles Darwin moved in the other direction. He discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics — the laws according to which things “just happen” — could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design. The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion. To such people, if a heart (or an eye or a bacterial flagellum) looks designed, that’s proof enough that it is designed.
I took the quote directly from his book.
And in doing so, you ignored both the context and the author's actual position.