Posted on 08/15/2009 9:49:24 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Certain bacteria can detect direction with ultra-tiny magnets that use bits of magnetic metals organized into structures called “magnetosomes.” Magnetosomes automatically orient to the earth’s magnetic field, and the bacteria use this information as a kind of cellular GPS when they’re traveling...
(Excerpt) Read more at icr.org ...
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Interesting phenomenon but a completely gratuitous conclusion
The gratuitous conclusion is the one that says that super-sophisticated, code-driven, bio-nano machines are the product of random mutations plus survival.
More of Brian Thomas’ flawed conclusions from unrelated details. Why doesn’t he suggest that chemotaxis is an obvious sign as well? Because it would be just as unsupportably ridiculous as his usual conclusions.
Chemotaxis is indeed an obvious sign of Creation/Intelligent Design. Thanks for pointing that out.
You are wrong, as usual.
I think this is one of the ones Brian just misunderstood, poor fellow. I think the release he read was missing a hyphen (it should have read “low-oxygen areas” rather than “low oxygen areas”), and Brian thinks these bacteria are swimming around looking for oxygen instead of trying to get away from it. Otherwise, his statement that “Rather, these bacteria appear to have been designed to live without oxygen” makes no sense. In any case, that statement is unsupported by anything in the original release.
I also think it’s amusing that you jumped on the horizontal gene transfer bandwagon when it suited you—when it looked like it would be responsible for “chopping down Darwin’s tree of life”—but are now hopping off again when it looks like HGT might explain something scientists observe. I guess “consistency” just means “always opposed to evolution,” eh?
I have actually pointed out that HGT is an Evo ad hoc rationization to explain the falsification of Darwin’s predicted “tree of life” on multiple occasions. That’s not to say that horizontal gene transfer does not take place. But if said HGT is part of God’s creation, and it was designed to prefer designated insertion points, then it cannot be invoked to save evolution from the fall of Charlie’s discredited “tree of life.”
If the abundant diversity of life on the planet Earth occurred merely due to random selection, then it qualifies as one of the greatest ‘miracles’ of the Universe.
Can you explain the difference between an "ad hoc rationalization" and a hypothesis?
Oh, I see. Since you put it that way, is it safe to say that we both then agree that ‘Despite the polished phrase “horizontal gene transfer,” the process itself is unobserved—an ad hoc story invoked to support evolution in the face of a decidedly non-Darwinian mosaic distribution of gene modules’???
Darwin never mentioned genetics.
I honestly don't know if the process has been observed or not. I'm not going to agree it's an "ad hoc story" unless you explain the difference between that and a hypothesis: a "tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation." Any new observation calls forth a proposed explanation, and in that (not very useful) sense they are all ad hoc stories.
And last, I'm not as hung up on Darwin as you are. Yes, not everything fits neatly into Darwin's schema--mostly, it's things he didn't even know existed. Big deal. The theory of evolution is more--much more--than what it was 150 years ago. Lots of science is.
But that was just a side comment anyway. If you don’t believe in HGT and are once again embracing scientists’ findings while rejecting their explanations, then I withdraw my comment. I apparently misunderstood and thought you were arguing for HGT.
My main point was that my pal Brian Thomas really blew it this time.
I just reread Thomas’ article, and the article it was based on, and as far as I can tell, he’s right on in terms of design being the best explanation. The magnetosomes are used by bacteria to find areas with low (or zero) oxygen levels. And the fact that the bacteria possess functionally integrated systems that utilize the magnetosomes to get them there suggests that they were designed to live in such environments right from the beginning. Although, I will agree with you on one point: it would have been more accurate to say these bacteria were designed to live in super low oxygen and zero oxygen environments, as they are apparently found in both.
I’m not surprised that you think design is the best explanation, and I won’t try to convince you otherwise now. (There are plenty of threads where people have tried to do that.)
My complaint about the article is that Brian writes, “This came as a surprise only because they believed that ‘magnetotactic bacteria evolved a clever method of using the Earth’s magnetic field to orient itself and swim downward—exactly the direction a microbe must move to locate low oxygen areas in lakes and oceans.’” I don’t see anything in the original article to support that conclusion about why they were surprised. That’s just a description of how the bacteria behave, and they already knew all the bacteria they looked at were magnetotactic—that’s why they chose them.
And then he writes, “Rather, these bacteria appear to have been designed to live without oxygen, and the magnetosomes are integrated systems that help the organisms live just that way.” Why “rather”? That’s not a contradiction to what he said about them before.
I wish I could explain it more clearly. He’s basically saying, “They found that the same genes were responsible for this feature in all the bacteria they looked at. This surprised them because they thought the feature evolved. Rather, it was designed.” He’s just asserting his conclusion—it doesn’t follow from the article he references.
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