“What he said.” And, what I’ve already said, “like I said.” Not claiming to have such an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that I should be the principal researcher at the Discovery Institute, or that you guys aren’t way more up on the details than I am. I’m saying the larger picture gets too easily lost in the avalanch of details.
But for those who are actually picturing themselves as climbing Mt. Improbable, any talk of avalanches elicits a cry of “foul,” for reasons that have nothing to do my actual argument. Understood, noted, and my best wishes for the climbers, as I continue to learn your particular arts, skills and techniques, while maintaining that a “satellite phone” is a good thing to have along. Cheers!
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true. but in a living creature it will use for nothing.
no problem. but note that this is irrelevant to the question of the ic problem. ic system can exist even if the object is made from organic components or has a self replicating system. so you need to show that an organic ic system can evolve stepwise when non organic cant. can you show that?
Perhaps it is, but it is not irrelevant to your analogy with bikes and gps computers. I don’t think we can take apart a bike and build a GPS computer from it, but a flagellum is not a bike or a gps computer in many crucial respects, so your analogy here fails.
There are many parts of the flagellum known to function just fine by themselves, such as the ATP synthase, and the secretory system.
You’re going to have to define what you mean by irreducible complexity (I have seen something like five to eight different definitions, and they each have their problems), and then you need to show that the flagellum IS irreducibly complex in the sense you mean. Can you do that?
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I’d like scd to start with telling us which one of the multiple flagella s/he’s talking about.
first: i dont think that its true. the ttss proteins for instance are different from the flagellum proteins (they are homologous but not identical). second: even if its true it doesnt prove that the flagellum isnt an ic system. for instance: we can remove parts (like a screen) from a cell -phone and it will still be functional. but it doesnt mean that we can made a cell phone in small steps.
by ic i mean any complex system that cant evolve stepwise.
any one of them will fit.
Homologous means share a common ancestor. In either case, they don’t need to be identical to be functional. There are many proteins that differ in sequence between species and they work just fine. We can find similar versions of most of the proteins in your genome, in organisms like fish and even arthropods. They are not identical with your proteins, they are different in sequence, yet they still work just fine.
We know of examples functional “broken” flagella that miss several key proteins, such as the filament. They still have the hook, the so-called “universal joint” of the flagellum that is claimed to only have a function in a complete flagellum. They don’t work as systems of motility though.
See for example:
Snyder LA. et al. Bacterial flagellar diversity and evolution: seek simplicity and distrust it?
Trends Microbiol. 2009 Jan;17(1):1-5. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2008.10.002.
Maezawa, K. et al. (2006) Hundreds of Flagellar Basal Bodies Cover the Cell Surface of the Endosymbiotic Bacterium Buchnera aphidicola sp. Strain APS strain APS.
J Bacteriol. 2006 Sep; 188(18): 6539–6543. doi: 10.1128/JB.00561-06
second: even if its true it doesnt prove that the flagellum isnt an ic system. for instance: we can remove parts (like a screen) from a cell -phone and it will still be functional. but it doesnt mean that we can made a cell phone in small steps.Once again, the flagellum isn't a cell phone, or a bike, or a gps computer. These analogies to macroscopic objects simply don't work.
by ic i mean any complex system that cant evolve stepwise.That definition merely declares what I'm asking you to prove. You think that an IC system is one that cannot evolve in stepwise fashion. Okay. Then please demonstrate that the flagellum is IC. It seems to me we already have evidence that it isn't.
For an argument from analogy to work the things you are comparing have to be similar in a relevant way. Biology is nothing like a car, or a bike, or a cell phone or GPS. This has been told to him for quite a while now. He refuses to accept it
No, that’s just a hypothesis.
again: we can remove parts from a cell phone and it will be just fine too.
this is your claim. but to show that my argument is wrong you need to show that that difference is what make the flagellum a reducible system. so you bring up the claim that we can remove parts from the flagellum and get a working system. but its also true for non living things. so you didnt yet proved this point. so the claim that living things are different didnt proved yet that they can evolve.
Then what is it you think prevents the flagellum from evolving?
Remember that the parts of a cellphone don’t change over generations due to mutation, they can just be taken apart or assembled again, but remain static.
But for the flagellum the individual parts are themselves subject to evolutionary change. The properties of the proteins change as mutations accumulate.
This is why I keep telling you your cellphone/bike/gps analogy doesn’t work, because the components of man-made inventions are not “malleable” in the way proteins are, they don’t mutate and change functions and attributes, in the same way that proteins do. That’s one of the reasons why your analogy fails, and why entities like the flagellum are evolvable while a cellphone or a bike might not be.
but to show that my argument is wrong you need to show that that difference is what make the flagellum a reducible system.No, I don't need to really show that. That the flagellum is irreducibly complex is just an idea you have, and you have chosen to believe, for what are demonstrably bad reasons. It seems to come down only to the idea that you can't "evolve" man-made inventions like bikes and computers.
So what evidence do you have that the flagellum is IC? Describing what you can do with a cellphone doesn’t tell us what can happen to the flagellum, they don’t share properties other than in the most superficial sense that they are built from many individual components.
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ok. i actually talking about a designer that is able to change anything he want. like mutations that can change anything in a living thing. so the fact that a flagellum can be replicated or made from organic components isnt
lets see. lets compare the flagellum to a watch so it will be more easy to show the problem:
(image from wiki)
now, this compass share several parts with a watch like hands, digits etc. but we cant just add a single part and change it into a watch. we need a motion system for instance to make the hand moving. and any motion system need at least several parts for its minimal function.