undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbgilroy2617d ago0 comments

For those who remember, the flagellum was a major site of the Intelligent Design debate that gave us Christopher Rufo (via the Discovery Institute)

The general idea was that there were specific examples of "irreducible complexity" that proved that there was an intelligent designer. The project on the part of certain Christian political factions was to add a veneer of hypothesis testing to creationism. The god of the gaps retreats further

0 comments

svieira17d ago

Doesn't "irreducible complexity" here mean "it wouldn't function in any reduced form", e. g. "it would not be possible to build this up in tiny parts useful for other things and then have those things transformed into these things by tiny accretions and removals over the course of the lifespans of these creatures."? The article doesn't cite anything that would suggest that this argument is any less relevant now that we understand how the system works than it was before we understood it at this level.

pstuart16d ago

It does raise the question of the steps that happened to reach that functionality (not suggesting intelligent design here). I'd assume there'd be quanta of evolutionary evolvement but it isn't clear what that would look like (especially to someone like myself who is not an evolutionary biologist).

pixl9716d ago

One thing to know about DNA is chunks of it can around not doing anything for long periods of time till suddenly more DNA comes in from somewhere and suddenly you have working behaviors. Things like Transposons are crazy.

melagonster16d ago

Scientists collect many examples of different type of flagellum. So we can understand how it change during the evolution process. This article introduces the finding of organism structure.

motoroco16d ago

this was addressed directly in TFA with a link to https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.03824-24

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse