High-power biological wheels and motors imaged for first time

[OrbitalDawn]

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2016-GLOBAL-hoot

Behold – the only known example of a biological wheel. Loved by creationists, who falsely think they are examples of “intelligent design”, the bacterial flagellum is a long tail that is spun like a propeller by nano-sized protein motors.

Now these wheels and their gearing have been imaged in high resolution and three dimensions for the first time. Morgan Beeby and his colleagues at Imperial College London used an electron microscope to resolve the mechanisms that provide different amounts of torque to the motors.

The motors are diverse, coming in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and power outputs. Indeed, the diversity of the motors and the fact that they have evolved many times in different bacterial lineages, scuppers the creationist view that the machinery is “irreducibly complex”.

 

[Arthur]

Thanks. Saw that on NS.

As an aside, Intelligent Design (of the Behe and Demski kind that touts "irreducible complexity") is firmly rejected by Thomists and other classical theists.

 

[Xarog]

Thanks. Saw that on NS.

As an aside, Intelligent Design (of the Behe and Demski kind that touts "irreducible complexity") is firmly rejected by Thomists and other classical theists.

It's kind of a pity they've impugned an otherwise creditable idea so badly.

The I in ID sits in one's DNA. Simply speaking intuitively, it would be orders of magnitude easier to evolve an information system that encoded environmental information directly into DNA than it would be to evolve complex organs that could essentially mimic the same process (i.e. processing information) such as the brain.

Why wouldn't DNA evolve to monitor which mutations appeared to give rise to the most fit individuals according to their lifetime stress levels (which has been categorically shown to influence epigenetics, btw)?

 

[Swa]

Love how they refer to "fact" again for something they don't know to be a fact.