OK. But my questions were what happens to the hypothetical other structureas when they lost their parts to make the first bacterial motor? Wouldn't that have been a big problem for the bacteria? And who moved the lego blocks around?
There is a very well known process called gene duplication. This is considered to be one of the most important sources of evolutionary change. When a DNA replication results in a duplicated gene (a mistake) the duplicate gene see different forces as far as conservation and function go, since the original gene is still around to serve the host for whatever purpose it had. This allows the duplicate gene to evolve a new role. This is one of the things that genetic sequencing is casting lots of light on, because across species we can start to peice together, what the origin of similar genes is, even though the final use might be quite different.
Imagaine that each gene is a computer subroutine, whose particular code even when altered abit, allows one to see authorship. The subroutine might well be used for a different function in different species (because of how it is invoked with other subroutines) but the heritage can still be determined.
It seems real unlikely that a cell could pull away a bunch of parts from hypothetical other structures without causing severe damage to itself and re-assemble them into a brand new structure, the bacterial flagellar motor, that has never existed before - all strictly by chance.
In general, it is not doing that.
Yes, I'm saying if life could arise easily by chance, it would be happening all the time and we could observe it in the process of happening.
There are arguments against that, but yes abiogenesis is not a field with much concrete substance at this time. It is largely speculative, hence creationism for the origin of life stands on almost equal footing as naturalistic explanations.
I see later you go on to criticize Behe for not assuming "functional co-option and deletion" - which sounds like the researcher saying things could be pulled from other structures and re-assembled like legos. Who's playing legos with cellular structures?
As I pointed out above, gene duplication results in a freer environment for the duplicated gene. While duplication has been known for a long time to be a factor, more recently the significance of gene location is being studied as well. It turns out that another set of copying errors results in gene relocation, called translocation. So it turns out that gene duplication and translocation might in fact be very significant for evolutionary development, much more so that point mutations, which for many years were put forward as the most likely cause of genetic change. In that sense, Behe could be said to be correct, that simple base pair mutations don't look like they can account for the diversity we see, within the timeframes we have. But as science keeps pushing along, we find and understand more mechanisms. So far, all the mechanisms are naturalistic, and fit fine within biology. |
