if its looks like a motor and act like a motor and even called a motor its a motor:
It’s just not an intelligently designed motor. You need to look beyond the superficial similarities to human designs.
It doesn’t look like a motor. Where are the coils of wires, metal pistons, and screw-type propeller?
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No. Rumraket isn’t giving you a criterion for the inference of design. He is pointing out that an unexplained origin for a thing is unexplained. It does not default to “design.” If one finds a UFO (which then devolves to being a “FO”) then one would evaluate it for such things as the signs of manufacture. If the methods used by aliens to manufacture it were akin to those used by humans to manufacture objects, one might be able to make a very persuasive argument for design. If they were nothing like our methods at all – if, say, aliens have figured out how to grow spaceships out of the ground – then the case might be more difficult.
But even if he does say that, you will have demonstrated that such a process is one possible cause of a flagellum. That would be a tremendous advance for your argument, which currently rests upon no showing that what you propose is even possible.
Definitions obviously WILL help, as you are trying to smash a bunch of things that are highly unlike each other into one word for the purpose of making an argument that they are the same thing. A “motor” in the one sense that you use the term is clearly a manufactured object made by humans. A “motor” in the other sense that you use the term is not manufactured but is grown by a biological organism, and is never seen to arise other than by being grown in this fashion. The two uses of “motor” do not have any parts or methods of construction in common.
Groan. Palm-slap to forehead.
No. I do not expect that we will. One does not “prove” an observation, however.
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Exactly! As a has-been linguist, I call foul (as well as “neither fish nor fowl”) on this ongoing equivocation fallacy which pretends that the flexibility of nouns in human languages represents anything fundamental and Platonic which somehow makes the anti-evolution offender innocent of equivocation fallacies.
The fact that English language speakers (and other languages speakers who share a similar scientific education using particular translation traditions and word choices) may choose to call both rotary electromagnetic motors and their flagellating rough-analogs by the same English noun, motor, does absolutely nothing to make them equivalent! Even in linguistics we don’t pretend that a shared name for a labelled object and some analog likened to it in some way and somehow automatically puts them in all of the same categories and classifications. Please! Don’t do this, @scd.
(Sometimes I want to scream when I hear this argument! Actually, I just did but you can’t hear me.)
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By the way, another example of this same kind of equivocation fallacy of confusing a noun and the analogies which happen to “borrow” that noun is the classic overplay of “DNA is the genetic code of life.” The statement is fine as long as one does not over-interpret it beyond its original meaning and one starts falling into equivocation. Is every template a “code”? Is every chemical formula a “code”? Is every set or “look-up table” describing and associating pairs a “code” in a cryptographic sense, for example? No.
(OK. I’m sorry. I just screamed again.)
I know the feeling.
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No. I’m just saying that when you don’t know then you don’t know. That doesn’t mean that you should automatically assume design when you don’t know. The point is: You don’t know.
If you have good evidence for design, you can conclude design.
But you must first determine what is good evidence for design. “It is complex” isn’t good evidence for design. Neither is “it performs a function in or as part of some other entity”. That may be ONE of the attributes of designed objects, but it is not EXCLUSIVE TO designed objects, hence we can not automatically infer design on that basis alone. It takes more.
There must be other criteria that tells us something was designed besides “it is complex” and “it performs a function in or as part of some other process or entity”, because those are not the sole product of design. They are also the product of evolutionary processes, and sometimes even non-evolutionary processes. Complex phenomena routinely result from simple physics and chemistry.
The only kind of design we know of is human design, which leaves certain types of evidence behind. It could be made of shiny and polished metals, be painted in decorative colors or symbols on it, it could have tool marks and mold lines, holes for screws and bolts and what have you. If you find stuff like these, you have reason to infer design either by humans or human-like entities.
If you do not at all know the methods or the capacities of the designer, then you can have no expectations of what the designer would want to design, hence no object you find could be said to be evidence for that designer because you have no reason to expect that object to be what the designer wanted to design. You will just be engaged in question begging, ad-hoc reasoning.
UFOs are alien spaceships, right? That’s what you mean by a UFO. A spaceship made by aliens, and what comes to mind is some sort of flying saucer probably made of shiny metal, created and designed by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Standing on a parking lot, making a deep humming sound, and possibly having fancy flashing lights around it.
If you find that, I’m fine with you inferring that it was designed.
If you mean something else by “UFO”, like a truly unidentified flying object, as in an object you don’t know what it is, you do not have any good pictures of it, and we can’t investigate it, but it was just claimed to have been seen in the sky at some point by someone, then no you can’t automatically assume it was designed.
After all, it is unidentified. It might be something else than an alien spaceship. A flock of birds, some sort of atmospheric lensing phenomenon, a cloud, the person who claims to have seen it had something stuck in her eye etc. etc.
No, false. If you really show me the flagellum being created by a designer, I will say that flagellum was designed.
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I agree, if it looks like a motor and acts like a motor, we can call it a motor. The bacterial flagellum is a motor. And it evolved. It is an evolved motor. An evolved motor that have many similarities to other motors that humans have designed. It also has some things that are not so similar but very different. But that’s okay, we can still call it a motor. The bacterial flagellum motor. Which evolved.
There are motors that are designed, and motors that are not designed. They have some similarities, and they have some differences. Some motors are designed, some motors are not designed. The bacterial flagellum is a motor that evolved instead of being designed.
Simple.
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Exactly. Just because humans may choose the same English noun to describe both designed motors and not-designed motors in no way demands that the two kinds of motors somehow exclaim in euphoric unison, “Humans have chosen to apply the same noun label to both of us—so we must surely be the same thing!”
I grew up near Amish country. We used to buy and sell all of our livestock at a sale barn in the heart of the Amish community. Those Amish used the noun “Englishman” to refer to everybody who wasn’t Amish. Could I conclude from that linguistic custom that every person that those Amish people encountered was from England? No! Labels don’t work that way.
The fact that we may refer to flagella as motors in no way demands that they be designed motors.
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On what objective basis did you determine it “evolved” and was not part of an original design?
Your sarcasm is inappropriate here for yes, it is an obvious truth that human designed objects such as watches or iPhones have very high FI content. To see this, consider that the FI of an object is directly but inversely linked to the probability that said object can emerge randomly from an unrelated state. I guess you understand that in the case of iPhones or watches, this probability is infinitesimal, right? If so, you will also recognize that the FI content of these objects is huge, much, much bigger than the 500 bits required to draw a design inference. And that’s fortunate, since we know these objects were designed!
Phylogenetic evidence, such as the fact that numerous of the individual proteins appear to share common ancestry as exhibited by the nesting hierarchical structure in their sequences, which can be used to trace the system’s gradual, evolutionary history from simpler structures with alternative functions.
Nick Matzke wrote about this all the way back in 2003: EVOLUTION IN (BROWNIAN) SPACE: a model for the origin of the bacterial flagellum
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What doesn’t have functional information, and why?
I shuffle a deck of cards thoroughly and lay them out one by one. The specific sequence of those cards has a probability of 1 in 52!, or 1 in 8x10^67. Is that high FI?
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Finally, in light of the organized complexity and apparent “design” of the flagellum, the very fact that a step-by-step Darwinian model can be constructed that is plausible and testable significantly weakens the suggestion that extraordinary explanations might be required.
On what objective basis do you think the model is plausible as Nick claims? I see similar proteins existed in the cell. Is there more that you see that would make it credible that 100K nucleotides could organize themselves to build this machine through random change? What do think caused this organization?
The concrete empirical reality that gene-duplication happen, that structures related to the flagellum with various alternative functions exist, that proteins can associate with each other and implement their functions, and that these in turn are visible to natural selection. All of this is explained in detail in Matzke’s article and the many good references cited therein.
I have no idea what “100K nucleotides could organize themselves to build this machine through random change” means, but it sounds like typically nonsensical “Tornado in a junkyard”-type thinking which has nothing to do with how evolution occurs.
I think the flagellum evolved by mutations (such as gene-duplications) subject to natural selection from other, simpler structures with alternative functions, such as membrane transport, infection, and adhesion systems. Because that’s the best explanation for the total available evidence, including the many demonstrable homologous relationships between these different systems and their component proteins.
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But you said it can’t be measured. So it can be guessed at while flapping one’s arms wildly and exclaiming that biological things must have been designed, but it can’t be measured?
Let’s return to my example: Functional Neck Length. FNL measures the length of a neck in relation to the thing of which it is a part. This can be calculated for objects which are designed, and for things not known to be designed.
My torque wrench has a high FNL, and we know that it was designed. A giraffe has a high FNL; ergo, giraffes were designed.
Is that a good argument? If not, why?
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This is a subjective claim as I can equally say the best explanation is there is design capability somewhere in the universe.
All that being said Nick spent a fair amount of time trying to build a model and we should appreciate that.
It’s what needs to happen in order for DNA to be able to reliably build this motor during cell division and allow fixation in the population.
Basic mathematics. Investigate how we use genetic algorithms (aka evolutionary algorithms) to solve problems–and even build structures–which humans otherwise find extremely challenging or even out of reach. My work with GA/EAs was one of the factors which brought me out of the anti-evolution mindset of my youth. (I was a young computer science professor who actually thought he had a better understanding of the “deficiencies” of evolutionary processes than the experienced biologists. Yes, I was young, cocky, and clueless. GA/EAs helped cure of me of that.)
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You are a clear thinker, sir. Exactly. Verbal identity means nothing when words are capable of referring to more than one thing. Many of these ID arguments come down to the attempt to use verbal identity as a proxy for actual identity: “I am a human, and am a certain height. You are a human; therefore, you must be the same height I am.”
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This is the model that is required vs just showing ancestral proteins. The strength of Behe’s argument is the amount of organization required to get advantage (algorithmic feedback) ie mobility.