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To: EBUCK; balrog666
(3AM in the Vatican)
Cardinal to sleeping Pope: Wake up, Holy Father!
Pope: Huhh? What is it Father Cardinal?
Card: I've got good news and bad news
Pope: Give me the good news
Card: Jesus has returned! the Second Coming is at hand!
Pope: Our faith was not in vain! How can there possibly be any bad news now?
Card: He's holding His press conference in Salt Lake City.
312 posted on 07/11/2002 3:20:38 PM PDT by Virginia-American
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To: Virginia-American
ROTFLMAO!!! That was great.

EBUCK

314 posted on 07/11/2002 3:22:52 PM PDT by EBUCK
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To: Virginia-American
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.
‘Irreducible complexity’ is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of Lehigh University, author of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap—a machine that could not function if any of its pieces were missing and whose pieces have no value except as parts of the whole.


What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion that operates like an outboard motor. The proteins that make up a flagellum are uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal joint and other structures like those that a human engineer might specify. The possibility that this intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is virtually nil, Behe argues, and that bespeaks intelligent design.

He makes similar points about the blood’s clotting mechanism and other molecular systems.

Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others.

Miller is hardly the epitome of reliability, as shown by the review by John Woodmorappe and myself of his book Finding Darwin’s God. Behe has also responded to critics such as Miller on this site.

In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells.

This actually comes from the NCSE’s misuses of the research of Dr Scott Minnich, a geneticist and Associate Professor of Microbiology at the University of Idaho, who says that belief in design has given him many research insights. His research shows that the flagellum won’t form above 37°C, and instead some secretory organelles form from the same set of genes. But this secretory apparatus, as well as the plague bacterium’s drilling apparatus, are a degeneration from the flagellum, which Minnich says came first although it is more complex (see Bacterial Flagella: Spinning Tails of Complexity and Co-Option).

The key is that the flagellum’s component structures, which Behe suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution.

Actually, what Behe says he means by irreducible complexity is that the flagellum could not work without about 33 protein components all organized in the right way. Rennie’s argument is like claiming that if the components of an electric motor already exist in an electrical shop, they could assemble by themselves into a working motor. However, the right organisation is just as important as the right components.

The final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the novel recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for other purposes.

318 posted on 07/11/2002 3:28:25 PM PDT by f.Christian
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To: Virginia-American
LOL! You made me laugh! And my throat is in a ridiculous state of soreness right now! It was laughter with a few 'OW's tossed in :-D
441 posted on 07/12/2002 3:15:24 AM PDT by JediGirl
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