Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (184075)	3/25/2006 1:25:11 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

The issue Behe raises is whether natural selection or some other natural cause can produce irreducibly complex molecular machines Behe is not interested in other natural causes. At least he puts forward no theories on the matter. Neither does anyone else from the ID camp. Instead they put forward a single comprehensive answer which explains nothing: It was designed that way. Well, first of all, that is a theory just one unacceptable to you. The naturalistic theories I've read seem inadequate. They always start with another irreducibly complex molecular structure and say maybe this changed into that. Which doesn't answer how anything irreducibly complex ever got started. Plus, the changing of one structure into another is all a hypothetical game of let's pretend. For example, in regard to the bacterial flagellar motor, part of it has a superficial resemblance to something called a type III secretory system. So they usually claim the motor evolved from the secretory system. Or vice versa. Either way how did the first one get started since both are irreducibly complex. And that's assuming that one could have evolved into the other. I just had an offline discussion the other day with a guy about this. He's a medical researcher at the Texas Medical Center - I can't tell you what his educational background is - you can't grill acquaintances about their cv. I do know he's not a doctor. But he's clearly well educated - either biology or chemistry - he's not just a lab tech. Anyway, the discussion was about the bacterial flagellar motor. nanonet.go.jp physics.ox.ac.uk Anyway he said each part of the bacterial motor could have come from other functions or structures, re-assembling like lego blocks. 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? We don't know, were the answers. 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. Are you saving that common descent means that life originated just once, hence is rare, therefore its origin must have been a special creation? 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. Obviously, it is not easily. And when you think about the encoding of very complex biological information in chemical bonds (the chemical bonds in and of themselves don't contain the information, they are like letters in a book or computer software), how could this just happen? Saying it could just happen is a statement of faith. Really a blind leap of faith. 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? I don't see cells playing legos with themselves or blind chance doing it. So I attribute it to God. Who for all I know maybe experimenting or playing around with nature - who knows.