#132 – Intelligent Design and the bacterial flagellum

Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist and Intelligent Design proponent, gives us his perspective of ID, and responses to several counterarguments against ID.

To start off our deep-dive into Intelligent Design, we wanted to talk to a knowledgeable representative of that movement. Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist who has been waving that flag for three decades now, and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute (“ID Headquarters”), was a great choice for this first conversation. In addition to exploring a variety of biochemical and physiological concepts, our main goal was to get his response to several counterarguments against Intelligent Design which we hear often (and resonate with).

Our points of discussion included:

• he’s not a Young Earth Creationist … he does accept human evolution from an ancestor we share in common with the apes; as an Intelligent Design proponent, he believes that the evolutionary steps had to have been guided (not random or undirected)
• “irreducible complexity” refers to a system/machine which has multiple parts and requires ALL of those parts to maintain its original function [our response: “sure, but it CAN be changed or reduced to do other functions”]
• his often-used analogy for irreducible complexity is a mouse-trap
• cells are made up of nanomachines which are made out of many parts, all of which are essential or the machine no longer works (“so they’re irreducibly complex”); his often-used example is the bacterial flagellum motor (BFM)
• he argues that this irreducible complexity can not be accounted for by Darwinian mechanisms
• counterargument #1: you can indeed take away certain parts, and what remains can still be quite functional, albeit perhaps not as a flagellum motor (or mousetrap). The BFM can be stripped down to a much smaller number of parts leaving another bacterial machine (the type III secretory system) which has a completely different function (it’s involved in squirting proteins out of the cell, rather than in giving the cell mobility). Also, many of the individual parts of the BFM can serve other functions on their own.
• counterargument #2: ID proponents tend to limit the discussion to “Darwinian” evolutionary mechanisms — random, undirected mutations of single base pairs — and avoid a more modern understanding of genetics which includes large-scale genetic changes which are orchestrated by the cell (duplication; reorganization; shuffling of whole sections of DNA; recombination; horizontal gene transfer; epigenetic changes)
• counterargument #3: if we’re going to attribute changes to a Designer, what do we do about examples of bad design (not just strange or clunky design …. but actually horrible design which produces indiscriminate suffering and death)
• counterargument #4: ID is not science. It doesn’t propose hypotheses that can be tested. It doesn’t explain the phenomenon (the mutation or new genetic trait), it only attributes the phenomenon to a Designer who worked in a mysterious way that we might never understand and for reasons that we can’t see
• counterargument #5: ID is more religion than science, and forces people to choose between the two (in a zero-sum fashion)
• there is another entirely different bacterial nanomachine called ATP-synthase which has jaw-dropping genetic and structural similarity to the type III secretory system at the heart of the BFM, but has yet another completely different function (it makes energy molecules, rather than squirt out proteins or give the cell mobility). This similarity might give clues regarding the evolutionary origin of the BFM. We’re going to get into this in much more detail in a couple weeks with experts in this area

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you haven’t already heard the two episodes that preceded this one (Episode #130 and #131), you really should: they’re all part of a mini-series we’re doing on Intelligent Design, and they set the stage for this one. You may also like Episode #70, where we talked to Dr. James Shapiro (an Emeritus professor with decades of hands-on experience with genetics at several world-renowned universities) about how cells routinely move large chunks of DNA around.

To find out more about Dr. Michael Behe, see his website or his page at the Discovery Institute.

Episode image: Ciker Vector Free Images from Pixabay.

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