Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Creation Moment 5/18/2016 - Railways = DESIGN

..... for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Psalm 139:14
 
"We're approaching the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Black Box (it appeared on August 2, 1996, to be precise). Michael Behe's book inspired a generation of Darwin discontents and showed that intelligent design was (and still is) firmly based on cutting-edge science. Among other highlights, he showcased two cellular organelles to illustrate his concept of irreducible complexity: the cilium and the flagellum.
These organelles, protruding from the cell into the environment, could not be built by a Darwinian mechanism, he argued, because they are composed of multiple, independent parts required for
function. Like a mousetrap, they could not work unless all the parts were present together at the same time.
All true, but in the intervening years molecular biologists have learned a great deal more about cilia and flagella. The revelations keep coming, like down to the day before yesterday.
In fascinating news from the University of Cambridge, we learn that "Algae use their 'tails' to gallop and trot like quadrupeds." (Those tails are Behe's famous flagella, though differing in structure from the bacterial flagella.)
They trot. They gallop.
Dr. Kirsty Wan was amazed when she first observed this, saying, "I realised immediately that this behaviour could only be due to something inside the cell rather than passive hydrodynamics." Think of how this expands the argument for irreducible complexity:
 
"The researchers determined that it is in fact the networks of elastic fibres which connect the flagella deep within the cell that coordinate these diverse gaits. In the simplest case of Chlamydomonas, which swims a breaststroke with two flagella, absence of a particular fibre between the flagella leads to uncoordinated beating. Furthermore, deliberately preventing the beating of one flagellum in an alga with four flagella has zero effect
on the sequence of beating in the remainder."

Any freshman confronted with an electron micrograph of a cilium must be impressed by the beautiful symmetry of its 9x2 structure. The elements of the structure are microtubules: long filaments that look like white dots in cross section. They are arranged in pairs around the periphery. The question is, "Why"? Science Magazine has just now come out with the answer: "Microtubule doublets are double-track railways for intraflagellar transport trains." One microtubule is for going up; the other is for coming down!
What's really interesting about the paper is the constant use of railroad terminology. There are "cargo trains" with "motors" that ride on microtubule "tracks" for "transportation." They function as "railways for intraflagellar transport" (IFT). Nowhere is a discussion of evolution to be found. Maybe that's because everyone knows train transportation systems are intelligently designed." EN&V